the State; his Council at Frankfort dictates to the West, in despite of Papal remonstrances, on the great subject of image-worship. For centuries no monarch had stood so high, so alone, so unapproachable as Charlemagne. He ruled-ruled absolutely-by that strongest absolutism, the overawed or spontaneously consentient, cordially obedient, co-operative will of all other powers. He ruled from the Baltic to the Ebro, from the British Channel to the duchy of Benevento, even to the Straits of Messina. In personal dignity, who, it must not be said rivalled, approximated in the least degree, to Charlemagne? He had added, by his personal prowess in war, and this in a warlike age, by his unwearied activity, and by what success would glorify as military skill, almost all Germany, Spain to the Ebro, the kingdom of the Lombards, to the realm of the Franks and to Christendom. Huns, Avars, Slavians, tribes of unknown name and descent, had been repelled or subdued. His one defeat, that of Roncesvalles, is only great in recent poetry. Every rebel, the independent German princes, like Tassilo of Bavaria, had been crushed; the obstinate Saxon, pursued to the court of the Danish King, at last became a subject and a Christian. On the Byzantine throne had sat an iconoclastic heretic, a boy, and a woman a murderess. Hadrian, during his long pontificate, had worn the Papal tiara with majesty. His successor, maimed and maltreated, had fallen to implore protection before the throne of Charlemagne; he had been obliged to clear himself of enormous crimes, to purge himself by

b See in H. Martin, Histoire de France, ii. p. 373, the very curious and spirited song (from a French historic periodical), called the Chant

VOL. III.

d'Altabiçar, said to have been preserved from the ninth or tenth century among the Pyrenean mountaineers.

F

oath before, what seemed to all, the superior tribunal of the Emperor. The gift of the Imperial crown had been the flattering homage of a grateful subject, somewhat loftily and disdainfully received; the donations of Charlemagne to the Pope were the prodigal but spontaneous alms of a religious King to the Church which he condescended to protect-free grants, or the recognition of grants from his pious ancestors.

Nor was it on signal occasions only that Charlemagne interfered in the affairs of the Church. His all comprehending, all pervading, all compelling administration was equally and constantly felt by his ecclesiastical as by his civil subjects. The royal commissioners inspected the conduct, reported on the lives, fixed and defined the duties, settled the tenure of property and its obligations, determined and apportioned the revenues of the religious as well as of the temporal hierarchy. The formularies of the Empire are the legal and authorised rules to bishops and abbots as to nobles and knights. The ecclesiastical unity is but a subordinate branch of the temporal unity. The State, the Empire, not the Church, is during the reign of Charlemagne a supreme unresisted autocracy. Later romance has fallen below, rather than heightened, the full reality of his power and authority.

But it was only during his long indeed but transitory His power reign. For the power of Charlemagne was personal. altogether personal, and therefore unenduring it belonged to the man, to the conqueror, to the legislator, to the patron of letters and art, to Charles the Great. At his death the Empire inevitably fell to pieces, only to be re-united occasionally and partially by some one great successor like Otho I., or some great house like that of Swabia. It was the first and last successful attempt to consolidate, under one vast empire,

the Teutonic and Roman races, the nations of pure German origin and those whose languages showed the predominance of the Roman descent. It had its inherent elements of anarchy and of weakness in the first principles of the Teutonic character, the independence of the separate races, the vague notions of succession, which fluctuated between elective and hereditary sovereignty with the evils of both; the Empire transmitted into feeble hands by inheritance, or elections contested by one-half the Empire; above all, in the ages immediately following Charlemagne, the separation of the Empire into independent kingdoms, which became the appanages of several sons, in general the most deadly enemies to each other. It was no longer, it could not be, a single realm united by one wide-embracing administration, but a system of hostile and conflicting states, of which the boundaries, the powers, the wealth, the resources, were in incessant change and vicissitude.

The Papacy.

The Papacy must await its time, a time almost certain to arrive. The Papacy, too, had its own source of weakness, the want of a settled and authoritative elective body. It had its periods of anarchy, of menaced-it might seem, at the close of the tenth century, inevitable-dissolution. But it depended not on the sudden and accidental rise of great men to its throne. It knew no minorities, no divisions or subdivisions of its power between heirs of coequal and therefore conflicting rights. It was a succession of mature men; and the interests of the higher ranks of its subjects, of the hierarchy, even of the great ecclesiastical potentates throughout the West, were so bound up with his own, that the Pope had not to strive against sovereigns as powerful as himself. Till the times of the anti-popes the papal power, though often obscured, especially in

Rome itself, appeared to the world as one and indivisible. Its action was almost uniform; at least it had all the steadiness and inflexibility of a despotism-a despotism, if not of force, of influence, of sympathy, and of cordial concurrence among all its multifarious agencies throughout the world to its aggrandisement.

But the empire of Charlemagne, as being the great epoch in the annals of Latin Christendom, demands more full consideration. Out of his universal Empire in the West and out of his Institutes rose, to a great degree, the universal empire of the Church and the whole medieval polity; feudalism itself. Western Europe became, as it were, one through his conquests, which gathered within its frontiers all the races of Teutonic origin (except the formidable Northmen, or Normans, who, after endangering its existence, or at least menacing the re-barbarising of many of its kingdoms, were to be the founders of kingdoms within its pale), and those conquests even encroached on some tribes of Slavian descent. It became a world within the world; on more than one side bordered by Mohammedanism, on one by the hardly less foreign Byzantine Empire. The history, therefore, of Latin Christianity must survey the character of the founder of this Empire, the extent of his dominions, his civil as well as his ecclesiastical institutes. As yet we have only traced him in his Italian conquests, as the ally and protector of the Popes. He must be seen as the sovereign and lawgiver of Transalpine as well as of Cisalpine Europe.

Karl, according to his German appellation, was the model of a Teutonic chieftain, in his gigantic stature, enormous strength, and indefatigable activity; temperate

Eginhard, Vit. Car, sub fine.

of Charle

in diet, and superior to the barbarous vice of drunkenness. Hunting and war were his chief occu- The character pations; and his wars were carried on with all magne. the ferocity of encountering savage tribes. But he was likewise a Roman Emperor, not only in his vast and organising policy, he had that one vice of the old Roman civilisation which the Merovingian kings had indulged, though not perhaps with more unbounded lawlessness. The religious Emperor, in one respect, troubled not himself with the restraints of religion. The humble or grateful Church beheld meekly, and almost without remonstrance, the irregularity of domestic life, which not merely indulged in free licence, but treated the sacred rite of marriage as a covenant dissoluble at his pleasure. Once we have heard, and but once, the Church raise its authoritative, its comminatory voice, and that not to forbid the King of the Franks from wedding a second wife while his first was alive, but from marrying a Lombard princess. One pious ecclesiastic alone in his dominions, he a relative, ventured to protest aloud. Charles repudiated his first wife to marry the daughter of Desiderius; and after a year repudiated her to marry Hildegard, a Swabian lady. By Hildegard he had six children. On her death he married Fastrada, who bore him two; a nameless concubine another. On Fastrada's death he married Liutgardis, a German, who died without issue. On her decease he was content with four concubines." darker suspicion, arising out of the loose character of his daughters, none of whom he allowed to marry, but carried them about with him to the camp as well as the

A

d The reading is doubtful. Bouquet has quatuor. Pertz has followed a MS. which gives three.