An Introduction to the History of Western Europe Part 9

[Sidenote: Two letters of Charlemagne's respecting the neglect of education among the clergy.]

Charlemagne was the first temporal ruler to realize the serious neglect of education, even among the clergy, and we have two interesting letters from him, written before he was made emperor, relating to this subject.

In one to an important bishop, he says: "Letters have been written to us frequently in recent years from various monasteries, stating that the brethren who dwelt therein were offering up holy and pious supplications in our behalf. We observed that the sentiments in these letters were exemplary but that the form of expression was uncouth, because what true devotion faithfully dictated to the mind, the tongue, untrained by reason of neglect of study, was not able to express in a letter without mistakes. So it came about that we began to fear lest, perchance, as the skill in writing was less than it should be, the wisdom necessary to the understanding of the Holy Scriptures was also much less than was needful. We all know well that, although errors of speech are dangerous, errors of understanding are far more dangerous. Therefore, we exhort you not merely not to _neglect_ the study of letters, but with a most humble mind, pleasing to G.o.d, earnestly to devote yourself to study, in order that you may be able the more easily and correctly to penetrate the mysteries of the Holy Scriptures."

In the other letter he says: "We have striven with watchful zeal to advance the cause of learning which has been almost forgotten through the negligence of our ancestors; and by our own example, we invite all those who can, to master the studies of the liberal arts. In this spirit, G.o.d aiding us, we have already carefully corrected all the books of the Old and New Testaments, corrupted by the ignorance of the copyists."

[Ill.u.s.tration: An Example of the Style of Writing used in the Books of Charlemagne's Time[50]]

It seemed to Charlemagne that it was the duty of the Church not only to look after the education of its own officers but to provide the opportunity of at least an elementary education for the people at large.

In accordance with this conviction, he issued (789) an admonition to the clergy to gather together the children both of freemen and serfs in their neighborhood and establish schools "in which the boys may learn to read."[51]

[Sidenote: Establishment of monastery schools and the 'school of the palace.']

It would be impossible to say how many of the innumerable abbots and bishops established schools in accordance with Charlemagne's recommendations. It is certain that famous centers of learning existed at Tours, Fulda, Corbie, Orleans, and other places during his reign.

Charlemagne further promoted the cause of education by the establishment of the famous "school of the palace" for the instruction of the sons of his n.o.bles and of his own children. He placed the Englishman, Alcuin, at the head of the school, and called distinguished men from Italy and elsewhere as teachers. The best known of these was the historian, Paulus Diaconus, who wrote a history of the Lombards, to which we owe most of what we know about them.

Charlemagne appears to have been particularly impressed with the constant danger of mistakes in copying books, a task frequently turned over to ignorant and careless persons. After recommending the founding of schools, he continues: "Correct carefully the Psalms, the signs used in music, the [Latin] grammar, and the religious books used in every monastery or bishopric; since those who desire to pray to G.o.d properly often pray badly because of the incorrect books. And do not let your boys misread or miswrite them. If there is any need to copy the Gospel, Psalter or Missal, let men of maturity do the writing with great diligence." These precautions were amply justified, for a careful transmission of the literature of the past was as important as the attention to education. It will be noted that Charlemagne made no attempt to revive the learning of Greece and Rome. He deemed it quite sufficient if the churchmen would learn their Latin well enough to read the missal and the Bible intelligently.

The hopeful beginning that was made under Charlemagne in the revival of education and intellectual interest was destined to prove disappointing in its immediate results. It is true that the ninth century produced a few noteworthy men who have left works which indicate acuteness and mental training. But the break-up of Charlemagne's empire, the struggles between his descendants, the coming of new barbarians, and the disorder caused by the unruly feudal lords, who were not inclined to recognize any master, all conspired to keep the world back for at least two centuries more. Indeed, the tenth and the first half of the eleventh centuries seem, at first sight, little better than the seventh and eighth. Yet ignorance and disorder never were quite so prevalent after, as they were before, Charlemagne.

General Reading.--The best life of Charlemagne in English is MOMBERT, _A History of Charles the Great_ (D.C. Appleton & Co., $5.00). See also HODGKIN, _Charles the Great_ (The Macmillan Company, 75 cents), and WEST, _Alcuin_ (Charles Scribner's Sons, $1.00).

CHAPTER VIII

THE DISRUPTION OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE

[Sidenote: Louis the Pious succeeds Charlemagne.]

35. It was a matter of great importance to the world whether Charlemagne's extensive empire was, after his death, to remain one or to fall apart. He himself appears to have had no expectation that it would hold together, for in 806 he divided it up in a very arbitrary manner among his three sons. We do not know whether he was led thus to undo his life's work simply because the older tradition of a division among the king's sons was as yet too strong to permit him to hand down all his possessions to his eldest son, or because he believed it would be impossible to keep together so vast and heterogeneous a realm. However this may have been, the death of his two eldest sons left only Louis, who succeeded his father both as king and emperor.

[Sidenote: Part.i.tion of Charlemagne's empire among the sons of Louis the Pious.]

Louis the Pious had been on the throne but a few years before he took up the all-important problem of determining what share each of his sons should have in the empire after his death. As they were far too ambitious to submit to the will of their father, we find no less than six different part.i.tions between the years 817 and 840. We cannot stop to trace these complicated and transient arrangements, or the rebellions of the undutiful sons, who set the worst possible example to the ambitious and disorderly n.o.bles. On the death of Louis the Pious, in 840, his second son, Louis the German, was in possession of Bavaria and had at various times been recognized as ruler of most of those parts of the empire now included in Germany. The youngest son, Charles the Bald, had all the western portion of the Frankish possessions, while Lothaire, the eldest, had been designated as emperor and ruled over Italy and the district lying between the possessions of the younger brothers. Charles and Louis promptly combined to resist the attempts of Lothaire to a.s.sert his superiority as emperor, and defeated him at Fontenay (841). The treaty of Verdun, which followed, is one of the most memorable in the history of western Europe.[52]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of Treaty of Verdun]

[Sidenote: Treaty of Verdun, 843.]

In the negotiations which led up to the treaty of Verdun there appears to have been entire agreement among the three parties that Italy should go to Lothaire, Aquitaine to Charles the Bald, and Bavaria to Louis the German. The real difficulty lay in the disposal of the rest of the empire. It seemed appropriate that the older brother, as emperor, should have, in addition to Italy, the center of the Frankish dominions, including the capital, Aix-la-Chapelle. A state of the most artificial kind, extending from Rome to northern Holland, was thus created, which had no natural unity of language or custom. Louis the German was a.s.signed, in addition to Bavaria, the country north of Lombardy and westward to the Rhine. As for Charles the Bald, his realm included a great part of what is France to-day, as well as the Spanish March and Flanders.

36. The great interest of the treaty of Verdun lies in the tolerably definite appearance of a western and an eastern Frankish kingdom, one of which was to become France and the other Germany. In the kingdom of Charles the Bald the dialects spoken by the majority of the people were derived directly from the spoken Latin, and in time developed into Provencal and French. In the kingdom of Louis the German, on the other hand, both people and language were German. The narrow strip of country between these regions, which fell to Lothaire, came to be called _Lotharii regnum_, or kingdom of Lothaire.[53] This name was perverted in time into Lotharingia and, later, into Lorraine. It is interesting to note that this territory has formed a part of the debatable middle ground over which the French and Germans have struggled so obstinately down to our own day.

[Sidenote: The Strasburg oaths.]

We have a curious and important evidence of the difference of language just referred to, in the so-called Strasburg oaths (842). Just before the settlement at Verdun, the younger brothers had found it advisable to pledge themselves, in an especially solemn and public manner, to support one another against the pretensions of Lothaire. First, each of the two brothers addressed his soldiers in their own language, absolving them from their allegiance to him should he desert his brother. Louis then took the oath in what the chronicle calls the _lingua romana_, so that his brother's soldiers might understand him, and Charles repeated his oath in the _lingua teudisca_ for the benefit of Louis' soldiers.[54]

Fortunately the texts of both of these oaths have been preserved. They are exceedingly interesting and important as furnis.h.i.+ng our earliest examples, except some lists of words, of the language spoken by the common people, which was only just beginning to be written. Probably German was very rarely written before this time, as all who could write at all wrote in Latin. The same is true of the old Romance tongue (from which modern French developed), which had already drifted far from the Latin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of Treaty of Mersen]

[Sidenote: New divisions of the empire corresponding to France, Germany, and Italy.]

37. When Lothaire died (855) he left Italy and the middle kingdom to his three sons. By 870 two of these had died, and their uncles, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, did not hesitate to appropriate the middle kingdom and divide it between them by the treaty of Mersen. Italy was left to Lothaire's only surviving son, together with the imperial crown, which was to mean nothing, however, for a hundred years to come. The result was that, as early as 870, western Europe was divided into three great districts which corresponded with startling exactness to three important states of modern Europe, i.e., France, Germany, and Italy.

[Sidenote: The empire temporarily reunited under Charles the Fat.]

Louis the German was succeeded in the East-Frankish kingdom by his son, Charles the Fat. In 884, owing to the death of the sons and the grandsons of Charles the Bald, there was no one to represent his line except a child of five years. So the aristocracy of the West-Frankish kingdom invited Charles the Fat to become their king. In this way it came about that the whole empire of Charlemagne was reunited for two or three years under a single ruler.[55]

[Sidenote: Charles the Fat and the Northmen.]

Charles the Fat was ill and proved an incompetent emperor, entirely unequal to the serious task of governing and protecting his vast territories. His weakness was especially shown in his pusillanimous treaties with the Northmen. When Paris was making an heroic defense against them under its count, Odo, Charles, instead of marching at the head of an army to relieve it, agreed to pay the invaders seven hundred pounds of silver if they would raise the siege. They were then permitted to take up their winter quarters far inland, in Burgundy, where they proceeded to burn and pillage at will.

[Sidenote: Charles the Fat deposed and succeeded by Arnulf.]

This degrading agreement so disgusted the West-Frankish n.o.bility that they were glad to join a conspiracy set on foot by Charles' nephew, the brave Arnulf of Carinthia, who had resolved to supplant his inefficient uncle. Charles was deposed and deserted by all his former supporters in 887. No one, except Napoleon, has ever again succeeded in bringing the eastern, western, and southern parts of Charlemagne's empire under his control, even for a brief period. Arnulf, although enjoying the t.i.tle of emperor, could scarcely hope to be recognized as king in all parts of the Frankish empire. Even nominal unity was no longer possible. As one of the chronicles of the time puts it, "While Arnulf was frittering away his time, many little kingdoms grew up."

[Sidenote: Origin of the kingdom of Burgundy, or Arles.]

In the West-Frankish territory the n.o.bility of the northern part chose Odo, the hero of the siege of Paris, as their king; but in the south another enterprising n.o.bleman, Count Boso of Vienne, succeeded in inducing the pope to crown him king of a certain district on the Rhone which included Provence. Immediately after Boso's death a large territory about the Lake of Geneva, which he had hoped to win for himself, became a separate kingdom under its own ruler. This region and that which Boso ruled to the south were later united into the kingdom of Burgundy, or, as it is often called, Arles.

Even before the deposition of Charles the Fat, many of the counts and other important landowners began to take advantage of the weakness of their king to establish themselves as the rulers of the districts about them, although they did not a.s.sume the t.i.tle of king. In the East-Frankish kingdom the various German peoples whom Charlemagne had managed to control, especially the Bavarians and Saxons, began to revive their old national independence. In Italy the disruption was even more marked than in the north.[57]

[Sidenote: Causes of disruption.]

[Sidenote: Poor roads.]

38. It is clear, from what has been said, that none of the rulers into whose hands the fragments of Charlemagne's empire fell, showed himself powerful and skillful enough to govern properly a great territory like that embraced in France or Germany to-day. The difficulties in the way of establis.h.i.+ng a well-regulated state, in the modern sense of the word, were almost insurmountable. In the first place, it was well-nigh impossible to keep in touch with all parts of a wide realm. The wonderful roads which the Romans had built had generally fallen into decay, for there was no longer a corps of engineers maintained by the government to keep them up and repair the bridges. In those parts of Charlemagne's possessions that lay beyond the confines of the old Roman Empire, the impediments to travel must have been still worse than in Gaul and on the Rhine; there not even the vestiges of Roman roads existed.

[Sidenote: Scarcity of money for paying government officers and maintaining armies.]

In addition to the difficulty of getting about, the king had to contend with the scarcity of money in the Middle Ages. This prevented him from securing the services of a great corps of paid officials, such as every government finds necessary to-day. Moreover, it made it impossible for him to support the standing army which would have been necessary to suppress the constant insubordination of his officials and of the powerful and restless n.o.bility, whose chief interest in life was fighting.

[Sidenote: New invasions,--the Northmen, Slavs, Hungarians, and Saracens.]

The disintegration of the Frankish empire was hastened by the continued invasions from all sides. From the north--Denmark, Norway, and Sweden--came the Scandinavian pirates, the Northmen.[58] They were skillful and daring seamen, who not only hara.s.sed the coast of the North Sea, but made their way up the rivers, plundering and burning towns inland as far as Paris. On the eastern boundary of the empire the Germans were forced to engage in constant warfare with the Slavs. Before long the Hungarians, a savage race, began their terrible incursions into central Germany and northern Italy. From the south came the Saracens, who had got possession of Sicily (in 827), and terrorized southern Italy and France, even attacking Rome itself.

[Sidenote: Growing power and independence of the great landed proprietor.]

39. In the absence of a powerful king with a well-organized army at his back, each district was left to look out for itself. Doubtless many counts, margraves, bishops, and other great landed proprietors who were gradually becoming independent princes, earned the loyalty of the people about them by taking the lead in defending the country against its invaders and by establis.h.i.+ng fortresses as places of refuge when the community was hard pressed. These conditions serve to explain why such government as continued to exist during the centuries following the deposition of Charles the Fat was necessarily carried on mainly, not by the king and his officers, but by the great landholders. The grim fortresses of the mediaeval lords, which appeared upon almost every point of vantage throughout western Europe during the Middle Ages, would not have been tolerated by the king, had he been powerful enough to destroy them. They plainly indicate that their owners were practically independent rulers.

When the traveler in France or Germany comes upon the picturesque ruins of a mediaeval castle, perched upon some rocky cliff, accessible from one side only, and commanding the surrounding country, he cannot but see that those ma.s.sive walls, with their towers and battlements, their moat and drawbridge, were never intended as a dwelling place for the peaceful household of a private citizen, but rather as the fortified palace of a ruler. We can picture the great hall crowded with armed retainers, who were ready to fight for the proprietor when he was disposed to attack a neighboring lord, and who knew that below were the dungeons to which the lord might send them if they ventured to rebel against his authority.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mediaeval Fortress, showing Moat and Drawbridges]

[Sidenote: The landed proprietor and the manor.]