Part 15 (1/2)

But, as M. Sismondi well remarks, their very ignorance and brutality made them the more easily the tools of the Roman clergy: 'Cette haute veneration pour l'Eglise, et leur severe orthodoxie, d'autant plus facile a conserver que, ne faisant aucune etude, et ne disputant jamais sur la foi, ils ne connaissaient pas meme les questions controversees, leur donnerent dans le clerge de puissants auxiliaires. Les Francs se montrerent disposes a hair les Ariens, a les combattres, et les depouiller sans les entendre; les eveques, en retour, ne se montrerent pas scrupuleux sur le reste des enseignements moraux de la religion: ils fermerent les yeux sur les violences, le meurtre, le dereglement des moeurs; ils autoriserent en quelque sorte publiquement la poligamie, et ils precherent le droit divin des rois et le devoir le l'obeissance pour les peuples {279}.'

A painful picture of the alliance: but, I fear, too true.

The history of these Franks you must read for yourselves. You will find it well told in the pages of Sismondi, and in Mr. Perry's excellent book, 'The Franks.' It suffices now to say, that in the days of Luitprand these Franks, after centuries of confusion and bloodshed, have been united into one great nation, stretching from the Rhine to the Loire and the sea, and encroaching continually to the southward and eastward. The government has long pa.s.sed out of the hands of their faineant Meerwing kings into that of the semi-hereditary Majores Domus, or Mayors of the Palace; and Charles Martel, perhaps the greatest of that race of great men, has just made himself mayor of Austrasia (the real Teutonic centre of Frank life and power), Neustria and Burgundy. He has crushed Eudo, the duke of Romanized Aquitaine, and has finally delivered France and Christendom from the invading Saracens. On his Franks, and on the Lombards of Italy, rest, for the moment, the destinies of Europe.

For meanwhile another portent has appeared, this time out of the far East. Another swarm of destroyers has swept over the earth. The wild Arabs of the desert, awakening into sudden life and civilization under the influence of a new creed, have overwhelmed the whole East, the whole north of Africa, destroying the last relics of Roman and Greek civilization, and with them the effete and semi-idolatrous Christianity of the Empire. All the work of Na.r.s.es and Belisarius is undone. Arab Emirs rule in the old kingdom of the Vandals. The new human deluge has crossed the Straits into Europe. The Visigoths, enervated by the luxurious climate of Spain, have recoiled before the Mussulman invaders.

Roderick, the last king of the Goths, is wandering as an unknown penitent in expiation of his sin against the fair Cava, which brought down (so legends and ballads tell) the scourge of G.o.d upon the hapless land; and the remnants of the old Visigoths and Sueves are crushed together into the mountain fastnesses of Asturias and Gallicia, thence to reissue, after long centuries, as the n.o.ble Spanish nation, wrought in the forges of adversity into the likeness of tempered steel; and destined to reconquer, foot by foot, their native land from the Moslem invader.

But at present the Crescent was master of the Cross; and beyond the Pyrenees all was slavery and 'miscreance.' The Arabs, invading France in 732, in countless thousands, had been driven back at the great fight of Tours, with a slaughter so great, that the excited imagination of Paulus Diaconus sees 375,000 miscreants dead upon the field, while only 1500 Franks had perished. But home troubles had prevented 'the Hammer of the Moors' from following up his victory. The Saracens had returned in force in 737, and again in 739. They still held Narbonne. The danger was imminent. There was no reason why they should not attempt a third invasion. Why should they not spread along the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, establis.h.i.+ng themselves there, as they were already doing in Sicily, and menacing Rome from north as well as south? To unite, therefore, the two great Catholic Teutonic powers, the Frank and the Lombard, for the defence of Christendom, should have been the policy of him who called himself the Chief Pontiff in Christendom. Yet the Pope preferred, in the face of that great danger, to set the Teutonic nations on destroying each other, rather than to unite them against the Moslem.

The bribe offered to the Frank was significant--the t.i.tle of Roman Consul; beside which he was to have filings of St. Peter's chains, and the key of his tomb, to preserve him body and soul from all evil.

Charles would not come. Frank though he was, he was too honourable to march at a priest's bidding against Luitprand, his old brother in arms, to whom he had sent the boy Pepin, his son, that Luitprand might take him on his knee, and cut his long royal hair, and become his father-in-arms, after the good old Teuton fas.h.i.+on; Luitprand, who with his Lombards had helped him to save Christendom a second time from the Mussulman in 737.

The Pope, one would think, should have remembered that good deed of the good Lombard's whereof his epitaph sings,

'Deinceps tremuere feroces Usque Saraceni, quos dispulit impiger, ipsos c.u.m premerent Gallos, Karolo poscente juvari.'

So Charles Martel took the t.i.tle of Patrician from the Pope, but sent him no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the measure of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul which his sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is now, as St.

Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing therefore in the lowest abyss of h.e.l.l.

So one generation more pa.s.ses by; and then Pepin le Bref, grown to manhood, is less scrupulous than his father. He is bound to the Pope by grat.i.tude. The Pope has confirmed him as king, allowing him to depose the royal house of the Merovingians, and so a.s.sumed the right of making kings.--A right which future popes will not forget.

Meanwhile the Pope has persuaded the Lombard king Rachis to go into a monastery. Astulf seizes the crown, and attacks Ravenna. The Pope succeeding, Stephen III., opposes him; and he marches on Rome, threatening to a.s.sault it, unless the citizens redeem their lives by a poll-tax.

Stephen determines to go himself to Pepin to ask for help: and so awful has the name and person of a Pope become, that he is allowed to do it; allowed to pa.s.s safely and unarmed through the very land upon which he is going to let loose all the horrors of invading warfare.

It is a strange, and instructive figure, that. The dread of the unseen, the fear of spiritual power, has fallen on the wild Teutons; on Frank and on Lombard alike. The Pope and his clergy are to them magicians, against whom neither sword nor lance avails; who can heal the sick and blast the sound; who can call to their aid out of the clouds that pantheon of demi- G.o.ds, with which, under the name of saints, they have peopled heaven; who can let loose on them the legions of fiends who dwell in every cave, every forest, every ruin, every cloud; who can, by the sentence of excommunication, destroy both body and soul in h.e.l.l. They were very loth to fear G.o.d, these wild Teutons; therefore they had instead, as all men have who will not fear G.o.d, to fear the devil.

So Pope Stephen goes to Pepin, the eldest son of the Church. He promises to come with all his Franks. Stephen's conscience seems to have been touched: he tries to have no fighting, only negotiation: but it is too late now. Astolf will hear of no terms; Pepin sweeps over the Alps, and at the gates of Pavia dictates his own terms to the Lombards. The old Lombard spirit seems to have past away.

Pepin goes back again, and Astolf refuses to fulfil his promises. The Pope sends Pepin that letter from St. Peter himself with which this lecture commenced.

Astolf has marched down, as we heard, to the walls of Rome, laying the land waste; cutting down the vines, carrying off consecrated vessels, insulting the sacrament of the altar. The Lombards have violated nuns; and tried to kill them, the Pope says; though, if they had really tried, one cannot see why they should not have succeeded. In fact, Pope Stephen's hysterical orations to Pepin must be received with extreme caution. No Catholic historian of that age cares to examine the truth of a fact which makes for him; nothing is too bad to say of an enemy: and really the man who would forge a letter from St. Peter might dare to tell a few lesser falsehoods into the bargain. Pepin cannot but obey so august a summons; and again he is in Italy, and the Lombards dare not resist him. He seizes not only all that Astolf had taken from the Pope, but the Pentapolis and Exarchate, the property, if of any one, of the Greek Emperors, and bestows them on Stephen, the Pope, and 'the holy Roman Republic.'

The pope's commissioners received the keys of the towns, which were placed upon the altar of St. Peter; and this, the Dotation of Pepin, the Dotation of the Exarchate, was the first legal temporal sovereignty of the Popes:--born in sin, and conceived in iniquity, as you may see.

The Lombard rule now broke up rapidly. The Lombards of Spoleto yielded to the double pressure of Franks and Romans, asked to be 'taken into the service of St. Peter,' and clipt their long German locks after the Roman fas.h.i.+on.

Charlemagne, in his final invasion, had little left to do. He confirmed Pepin's gift, and even, though he hardly kept his promise, enlarged it to include the whole of Italy, from Lombardy to the frontier of Naples, while he himself became king of Lombardy, and won the iron crown.

And so by French armies--not for the last time--was the Pope propt up on his ill-gotten throne.

But the mere support of French armies was not enough to seat the Pope securely upon the throne of the western Caesars. Doc.u.mentary evidence was required to prove that they possessed Rome, not as the va.s.sals of the Frankish Kaisers, or of any barbarian Teutons whatsoever; but in their own right, as hereditary sovereigns of Rome. And the doc.u.ments, when needed, were forthcoming. Under the name of St. Isidore, some ready scribe produced the too-famous 'Decretals,' and the 'Donation of Constantine,' and Pope Adrian I. saw no reason against publis.h.i.+ng them to Charlemagne and to the world.

It was discovered suddenly, by means of these remarkable doc.u.ments, that Constantine the Great had been healed of leprosy, and afterwards baptized, by Pope Sylvester; that he had, in grat.i.tude for his cure, resigned to the Popes his western throne, and the patrimony of St. Peter, and the sovereignty of Italy and the West; and that this was the true reason of his having founded Constantinople, as a new seat of government for the remnant of his empire.

This astounding falsehood was, of course, accepted humbly by the unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come. It is said--I trust not truly--to be still enrolled among the decrees of the Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics. Be that as it may, on the strength of this doc.u.ment the Popes began to a.s.sume an all but despotic sovereignty over the western world, and--the Teutonic peoples, and Rome's conquest of her conquerors was at last complete.

What then were the causes of the Papal hatred of a race who were good and devout Catholics for the last 200 years of their rule?