rearguard of Charlemagne was attacked and cut off. With it perished some of his bravest captains, or, as the romancers afterwards called them, his paladins. Amongst them was his nephew, the famous Roland, the hero of Ariosto, precisely chronicled by Eginhard, as prefect of the frontiers of Brittany. The bad success of this expedition inspired Charlemagne with a disgust of warring against the Saracens. Their frontier was far from Charles's Austrasian province on the Rhine, which furnished his best and most attached soldiers, whilst he could expect nothing save disaffection and treachery from his subjects of Aquitaine.

The land of the Saxons bordered, on the contrary, upon his native dominions, and was not far from his chosen capital, Aix-la-Chapelle. This it behoved him to make the centre of his monarchy, and to repel from it by force of arms the dangerous vicinity of pagans and barbarians. Charlemagne had already led two expeditions against them. In the first, he had overthrown their great idol, and ruined his temple. In the next, he established fortresses and garrisons, compelling the people to be baptized, and to swear fealty to him. The Saxons, however, were not to be quelled by the same facile means as the civilised citizens of Gaul. Again and again they rose in insurrection, headed by Witikind, a hero worthy of being the rival of Charlemagne. As long as Witikind found the spirit of independence alive amongst the Saxons, or as often as he could awake it, he led them against the Franks; and when his vanquished countrymen submitted to the conqueror, he alone disdained to stoop, and fled across the Baltic, from whence he returned more than once to excite the Saxons against Charlemagne. The monarch of the Franks vowed to extirpate the stubborn pagans altogether, and for many successive years he wasted their country, that is, its population and cattle, with fire and sword. Even the proud spirit of Witikind was forced to bow before the conqueror; the Saxon hero appeared at the Champ de Mai, and vowed obedience to Charles.

800

CONQUEST OF THE SAXONS.

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He

The latter, however, could not trust the Saxons. transported immense numbers of them from the banks of the Elbe to the interior of his dominions, and at the same time divided their country into benefices, which he distributed to his prelates, that the remnant of the Saxons might become Christian as well as subject.

This is a fit place to mark an important point in Charlemagne's policy. As he conquered himself the greater part of his empire, he had to appoint the rulers or lords of provinces and districts; in other words, counts and dukes. He dreaded the aristocracy, which had raised his family on the ruins of the Merovingians; and his object was to prevent the great charges of the empire, and the governments of provinces, from becoming hereditary. He wanted to form a monarchy on the oriental plan, in which the nobles, enjoying privileges attached to their persons, not to their race, were unable to perpetuate and consolidate their power. This plan, obviously tending to despotism, was fortunately frustrated. Charlemagne's views in this respect led him to lean so much to the church, and to prefer bestowing territorial commands upon prelates rather than upon lay nobles. And the same principle governed both him and Pepin in their unaccountable generosity to the pope of Rome.

The year 800 is the date of a ceremony which, though but a ceremony, and produced in a great measure by accident, has had more influence upon the state of Europe than all the victories of the century. A conspiracy broke out in Rome against pope Leo III.: he was taken prisoner, maltreated, but contrived to escape. He fled for protection to Charlemagne; and that monarch, receiving the fugitive with his wonted piety, led him back to Rome at the head of an army, reinstated him, and took vengeance upon his enemies. It was on the following Christmas that Charles, accompanied by his court and an immense assemblage, heard mass performed by Leo in the church of St. Peter's. At its conclusion, the pope advanced in procession towards

the monarch, placed on his head a crown of gold, and saluted him by the titles of Emperor and Augustus. Thus was the empire of the west restored in the person of Charlemagne. The Frank was seated on the throne of the Cæsar. Nor was the ceremony, as we might deem it, an idle pomp;-it gave rights and dignity and power. Precedent and authority were the only logic of the age; and the magic of a name, not without influence in this day, was all-powerful in that. No very considerable event afterwards occurred to mark the declining years of Charlemagne. He died in 814, at Aix-laChapelle, and was buried in the famous Münster or cathedral which he had founded.

Charlemagne was a man of extraordinary mind and powers. To the characteristics of a hero and a conqueror, he united those of a monarch and legislator. In an age when the monastic virtues had superseded all others, he alone made those of the statesman temper them; and though so devoid of early education as to be unable to write, he supplied the defect by study throughout the whole course of his busy reign, and became a judge and a patron of letters at a time when the taste seemed utterly extinct save in him. Three hundred years were yet to elapse ere chivalry was to flourish, and yet Charlemagne anticipated its spirit; and the romancers of after time had recourse to him and to his paladins as the fittest models of knightly conduct and chivalrous valour.

The descendants of Charlemagne shall here be treated with as little notice as those of Clovis. Both degenerated, and were trampled under foot by the aristocracy. But the changes which the nation underwent during the reign of the Carlovingians are far better known, and far more important. There is this peculiar character in their history; that personages and incidents, with one exception, that of Rollo and the cession of Normandy, are utterly unattractive, whilst the silent progress of society offers a picture full of interest. We can afford to take but a cursory glance at the latter.

841.

SUCCESSORS OF CHARLEMAGNE.

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There is no political truth more fully known and admitted, than that slaves and freemen cannot continue long to form together the labouring class of the community. Universally, in a generation or two, the freemen disappear; the slaves alone remain upon the soil. Such was the case under the successors of Clovis. The conquests of Charlemagne spread a new race of freemen over the face of Gaul: under his successors they gra- ! dually disappeared. Compelled to join the army at their own expense, unprotected from violence, as slaves were, by a powerful master, and disdaining those agricultural occupations practised by bondsmen, the freeman soon abandoned his little property, or saw it wrested from him by force. Most generally he perished, or perhaps was sold to pay off the weight of fines which his poverty forced him to incur.

Of the class of freemen the armies of Charlemagne were composed. There remained still sufficient to carry on the civil wars betwixt his grandchildren: between them the battle of Fontenay was fought in 841, in which forty thousand men are said to have perished; and all the historians of the time agree that the whole force of France perished with them. Henceforward the Normans and Saracens met nowhere with resistance, and the entire kingdom was exposed defenceless to pillage. How was this? The surviving population, excepting the class of prelates and nobles, were serfs and villains, and consequently forbidden and unused to bear arms. The state was without a defender,—the melancholy and inevitable consequence of slavery.

The lesser aristocracy also had greatly decayed. The equal division of property amongst brethren proved nearly as destructive to the noble as to the monarch. In the middle of the ninth century, the church stood alone unimpaired, and seemed at once to be possessed of all property as of all power. The kings, however, inherited the right, tenaciously held and exercised by Charlemagne, of appointing the superior governors, or dukes and counts of provinces. In the reigns of his weak

successors, and principally in that of Charles the Bald, his grandson, the sovereign, in order to gain the support of the leading nobles against his competitors, found it necessary to abandon to them their commands, with hereditary rights thereto. Here the system of Charlemagne, and of the old and oriental monarchies, was departed from, and an hereditary aristocracy formed, possessed, each in his county, of all the attributes of sovereignty, and wanting nothing but the name.

Previously to this, the proprietors of the provinces held their lands of the monarch, and professed allegiance exclusively to him; but now, the dukes and counts came to stand in the royal place. Finding a great portion of the lands destitute of cultivators, owing to the devastations of the Normans, they distributed them to their followers, demanding in return personal allegiance to themselves rather than to the common sovereign. Thus were formed the sub-infeodations, the essential principle of the new political state,- the fibre, as we may say, which soon grew forth into the vast body of the feudal system.

The feeble characters of the Carlovingian monarchs, together with those frequent partitions and exchanges of territory amongst them, which prevented any power from being consolidated in their hands, or any feeling of loyalty from taking root in the bosoms of the people, was the chief cause of their fall, and of the weakness which abandoned their rights to the possessors of the great fiefs. The frequent invasions of the Normans contributed powerfully, however, towards the same effect.

Almost from the reign of the Antonines to that of Charlemagne, the current of barbaric conquest had continued to overflow the Danube and the Rhine. The great effort of this hero's life was to check its torrent; and he succeeded. For the first time the northern nations became inspired with a dread of the south, and despaired to force their way, by land at least, into the fertile regions where their ancestors had emigrated.