In each of these four months,
Charles ordered courts to be held at different places with the count
of the district.
Charles ordered courts to be held at different places with the count
of the district.
Cambridge Medieval History - v2 - Rise of the Saracens and Foundation of the Western Empire
Even though the principle was effective
that laws were not to be made without the co-operation of those
classes for whom they were intended, the summons to a Diet of those
concerned was clearly sufficient. For the participation of the people
ended with participation of the subjects in Diets. That is the fixed
principle of the Frankish State to which all accounts of the legislation
of the Frankish kings point.
In connexion with the contrast of Folkright and King's Law, the
Carlovingian Capitularies which deal with secular matters, and from
which only Capitularies containing ecclesiastical regulations are to be
separated, are commonly divided into three groups according to contents,
origin, and period of validity: (1) Capitula legibus addenda, (2) Capitula
per se scribenda, (3) Capitula missorum. The first are said to contain
those decrees which modify or supplement laws of the Folkright; the
second to refer to such ordinances as concerned the relation of the
subjects to the Empire; the third to be instructions for the king's
envoys. The first, according to the usual view, were raised to law by
a decision of the people; the second were called into existence on the
ground of an agreement of king and Diet and did not claim lasting
validity; the third owed their origin to the personal decision of the
monarch alone and were of merely temporary validity. The first
embrace Folkright; the second King's Law; the third administrative
measures.
This favourite differentiation1 proceeds from modern legal conceptions
and reads them into an age that knew nothing of such legal differences,
and could not know. When several explanations were necessary at the
same time for one Folkright—the Lex Salica, Ripuaria, or the Lex Baiu-
varwrum, or when numerous supplements to the leges generally were to be
issued, it was the custom at the king's court to combine them in special
ordinances, in Capitula legibus addenda. If, however, there were only
a few points of the law in question to be explained, while other legal
measures were to be taken at the same time, they were all combined in
one ordinance. But of a different origin and of a different validity there
is no trace. Whether the penal or judicial clauses occur in a capitulary
which simply contains analogous regulations supplementing the rules of
a Folkright, or whether they occur in a law referring to matters of a
1 Started by Boretius, adopted by many investigators.
ch. xxi. 43—2
## p. 676 (#708) ############################################
676 The Capitularies
different character, there is no hint of a different origin, and scarcely of
a difference in validity, for this was quite independent of the intrinsic
significance of the law. That was merely the consequence of a purely
external method of legislating applied according to circumstances. It
was only applied according to circumstances, for the great mass of extant
capitularies shew that the Carlovingians did not and could not know
anything of the principles of a threefold division. If we disregard the
not very numerous Carlovingian capitularies that can be reckoned a*
Capitula legibus addenda, and if we also disregard those ordinances
which are evidently instructions for the king's envoys, there remains
the great mass of the capitularies, containing regulations of the most
different kinds, judicial and administrative regulations, ordinances for
the army, for the administration of justice, for the Church, and in civil
matters. That is characteristic of the whole government under Charles
the Great—the needs of the moment are satisfied. To the king's court
came complaints, requests, inquiries, which were dealt with by the king
and councillors or in some cases by the assembled Diet. As ecclesi-
astical regulations were frequently grouped together in independent
ordinances, so occasionally—when the subject required or permitted it—
were single groups of secular ordinances: instructions, supplements, or
modifications of leges. But what had by chance been jointly debated
and decided could also just as well be comprehended in a law. This
was carried out on no intentional system. Rather, the want of a
system was characteristic. Significant is the attempt of the State to
provide for the development of the Law by numerous disconnected
measures to meet special needs of the moment. There was nothing
like a principle of difference between law and prescript, nor even a
clear difference between legislation and administration.
Two powers were in operation: King and People. They worked in
harmony, they also worked in opposition. A conflict between popular
influence and royal influence necessarily manifested itself in the restricted
sphere of the Frankish tribe from the moment that the monarchy in
its excessive strength arose as a new independent power. But it was
seen still more significantly in the districts of those other Germanic
tribes which had been brought into subjection by the Frankish king and
possessed a copious system of Law independently developed, and which
were now to be embraced in the unity of the Frankish Empire. But the
conflict of popular and royal influences was not limited to the sphere of
legislation. It naturally became prominent in all spheres of corporate
life. The consideration of the administration of the provinces under
Charles will also shew this—the ancient popular institutions on the one
hand, the new desired by the central authority on the other.
The Carlovingian government of the provinces was based upon the
system of counties. The whole Empire was divided into districts, at
the head of which stood counts, an old institution already known under
## p. 677 (#709) ############################################
Local Govei-nment 677
the Merovingians, but first consistently and fully used by Charles the
Great. Thereby a long process was brought to a close, a process of
competition between the institutions desired by the Frankish govern-
ment and the ancient institutions of the different tribes and districts
incorporated into the Frankish State. We are often no longer able to
recognise what existed before the Frankish conquest, and how it was
overcome by institutions of the Frankish kingdom. But there had
been a long struggle between the two forces—between the old popular
institutions on the one hand, and those proceeding from the Frankish
authority on the other. In this sense there was a significant opposition
of popular and royal influences, of Folkright and King's Law. Gradually
we can observe the advance of what was desired by the central authority.
When the Merovingians conquered Gaul and extended their rule
over different tribes of the Germanic East, they did not abolish the
national institutions altogether. Just as they left to the different
peoples their own Law, so they left them also their national insti-
tutions. The tribal authorities largely remained, and were merely
brought into a condition of dependence, looser or closer. But the
process of centralisation was continued by the Carlovingians and per-
fected by Charles the Great. The old institution of Herzog, or Duke,
partly local ruler, partly local official, was set aside—a characteristic piece
of internal policy. Duke Tassilo of Bavaria was the last representative
of the internal ducal authority. After his deposition in the year 788,
the Bavarian district was linked on to the usual Frankish county
administration. Only among the Basques in Vasconia and the Bretons
in Brittany are the native dukes, in the old Merovingian sense, still
to be found, even under Charles. Elsewhere dukes are met with, but
not as independent representatives of local popular authority. They are
merely officials of the king, furnished with extraordinary military power,
to whom—sometimes only temporarily—larger provincial districts were
assigned or special full powers on the borders of the Empire. Their
office, however, as a regular part of the constitution was unknown
under Charles. The provincial division of the land rested upon one
indispensable basis—the division into counties.
Naturally, on the introduction of this system, former divisions of the
people and land were utilised. In Roman Gaul, the old town districts,
the civitates, became the Frankish counties, Gaue or districts; in the
purely German parts, the old divisions of people and land which some-
times corresponded to the old German tribes. How far old divisions
were utilised or new ones created is, from the nature of the case, not
open to investigation in particular instances. One thing must be
clearly kept in mind in all examinations of the territorial division
of the Frankish as of the later States—the designation Gau (i. e. District,
Latin Pagus) very often refers to the county, but not always. It would
be a mistake, though it has often been made, to regard every Gau as a
CH. XXI.
## p. 678 (#710) ############################################
678 Gaue. Comites
future county. Gau also occurs from the very beginning as the name
of other administrative districts besides those of the county. It
occurs moreover as a purely geographical description without reference
to a definite administrative district. Gau and county were frequently
synonymous, but occasionally were different from the beginning.
Under Charles the Great the county is the administrative district
simply, the natural base of all state activities. Wherever this system
of counties was wanting in Charles' Empire, the imperial authority
purposely abstained from a real incorporation of that district into the
Empire. We may say definitely that the measure of the realisation of
the system of counties shews us the measure of acceptance of the imperial
power itself.
The garafio {gerefa, greva) the Franks had already possessed before
the foundation of the Empire. Comites were already known in the
Merovingian age as powerful officials of the Gaulish civitates. For
some time graf and comes stood side by side in the Merovingian
kingdom. Not certainly in the same gau. The relation is rather to be
so understood as that the Roman districts in connexion with older
arrangements possessed comites, while the purely Frankish districts had
graf8. The distinction soon disappeared. The comes adopted much from
the graf, the graf much from the comes, and there arose the single office
of graf under the Frankish monarchy. The graf is the definite organ of
royal government in judicial, fiscal, military, and administrative respects.
The usual official title for the graf is under Charles the Great the
Latin word comes, and more rarely the less definite expressions prae-
fectus, praeses, rector, and also consul.
Charles disposed of the office as he thought fit. No general uniform
principle directed the choice of men. Largely it was eminent Franks
who were placed in important posts of trust, whether in Franconia
itself or in conquered districts to maintain the authority of the Empire
in face of the native chiefs. Occasionally, however, Charles sought to
win the most eminent men of the conquered race to himself by conferring
upon them the most important provincial posts, and in this way to render
possible the gradual reduction of the new people to an integral part of
the Empire. Then again, it is reported to us that he bestowed the
office of count on men who were not noble, even upon freedmen. In
fact, in the bestowal of offices, only the one principle prevailed, that
those were to be placed at the head of the district from whom the best
service for the good of the Empire might be expected.
The office was bestowed for life, but of course in case of disloyalty,
or even of bad government, it might be withdrawn without hesitation.
That Charles always reserved a free hand for himself is testified beyond
doubt, and therefore the allusions to the count's owing his office to the
grace of God are not so much emphasis of independence as a confession
of the humility due to God.
## p. 679 (#711) ############################################
The authority of the Count 679
The authority of the count himself was unusually extensive. It
embraced everything that concerned the State. The count is the king's
representative in his district. Just as the authority of the State mani-
fested itself primarily in military and judicial matters, so also did the
activities of the count. The count was the supreme administrator of
justice in his district. Usually he had to hold the general assemblies
of the gau, which, according to the regulations of Charles, brought
together all the freemen of the gau two or three times a year in what
were afterwards called the regular "Things. '" Difficult law cases, it
was specially enjoined by Charles the Great, the count was to determine
himself and not to leave to his subordinate officials. In the court of
the centenarius or subordinate judge, it runs in one law, no man may be
condemned to death, loss of freedom, or forfeiture of land or slaves—
that was reserved for the count or for the king's envoy. It was not
intended that this higher jurisdiction should be restricted to the three
great annual "Things," but only that the transfer of the most important
cases into the hands of the subordinate officials should be prevented1.
It was a principle of the constitution that the count was the ordinary
judge in the gau.
The organisation of the army was also in the hands of the count.
By him the levies were led or superintended, and he himself went on
campaign with the vassals of his district—one of his most important
functions. On him it further rested to summon to the royal service and
to exact state requirements from the freemen of the gau. He had to
represent in himself the special defensive authority of the king, just as
he had to see to the general peace. And just as the State in Carlo-
vingian times extended its power in different directions, the powers of
the count also, the representative of the State in the gau, seem unusually
extensive, particularly in the direction of matters of police.
In ecclesiastical affairs, also, the count is to help, as though assistant
to the bishop. Just as things secular and spiritual converged in Charles'
kingship, so willing co-operation was desired on the part of local bearers
of ecclesiastical and secular authority. The counts were directed to be
obedient to the bishops and to support them in all things. Rivalry
often disturbed the harmony, and Charles caused inquiry to be made
how an exact definition of the count's powers in spiritual matters and
of the bishop's in secular could be accomplished. But there was never
any doubt that bishops and counts were to be equally regarded as
important officials of the State. Louis the Pious caused the bishops
regularly to make reports concerning the counts, and the counts con-
cerning the bishops, so that he could exercise exact control. Naturally,
the count was furnished with the coercive powers indispensable to all
rulers. Such power under Charles the Great was so regulated that
1 Such is the view of Waitz, Verfassungsgesch. iv. pp. 381 ff. , to which for the
most part sufficient attention is not paid.
CH. XXI.
## p. 680 (#712) ############################################
680 The Marches
punishments were even fixed for disobedience to official orders, varying
according to the nature of the order, in such a way that the official was
allowed to determine a penalty independently of the object of the orders,
and graduated according to his personal authority1. According to the
Alemannic Law the count's " ban" amounted to six shillings, according
to the Saxon Capitulary of Charles the Great, for smaller transgressions
it was fifteen, and for more serious cases of disobedience sixty shillings.
Not till later, when the sixty shilling penalty was more generally used
and had become the punishment for disregard of a royal order, was the
official who was looked upon as essentially the king's official, the count,
regarded as holder of this king's ban.
Only a peculiar form of the system of government by counts, not an
abrogation of it, is seen in the organisation of the marches, which may
justly be looked on as the personal work of the great Emperor. That
the counties situated on the border of the Empire were provided with
arrangements for the defence and protection of the Empire is natural.
We must distinguish from these border counties the march district
proper, the newly conquered border land or else that specially arranged
for border defence, provided with numerous fortifications and forming
a bulwark before the counties of the Empire itself. So arose under
Charles himself, or at any rate at his instance, the Spanish, Breton,
Saxon or Danish, Sorbian, Avarian, and Friulian marks. Those at the
head of them were called graf, also margrave, markherzog, and by
similar titles. Sometimes border counties were in connexion with the
marches, and so arose a specially strong power, predominantly military,
which obtained for its owner the proud title of duke. Thus we can
understand when the Monk of St Gall, at the end of the ninth century,
relates how on the borders of the Empire Charles departed from the
rule that to one person only one county should be assigned.
If we see a thoroughgoing uniformity in the division into counties,
and only those districts were freed from it which had not been com-
pletely incorporated into the Empire, we cannot trace a similar
uniformity in the case of the subordinate officials. Here there were
great differences. And that is perfectly intelligible. In the first place,
if the Empire laid great weight on the carrying out of the county system
and sought to put aside everything that resisted the Frankish arrange-
ments, of course the old popular officials could no longer be left in the
lower places. Thus many differences are due to a continuation of
the old popular system or to a connexion of it with Frankish arrange-
ments. And moreover districts in private ownership became more and
more important, and the officials of the private owners more and more
assumed public functions, dispossessed the lower state officials and took
their place. Hence, in the dominions of Charles the Great we observe
1 Cf. Seeliger, Voiksrecht und KSnigsrecht, pp. 366 ff.
## p. 681 (#713) ############################################
Subordinate Officials 681
different officials acting in the subordinate positions side by side, and
the same official titles occur among those holding different official
positions.
The officials working under the counts are for the most part to be
divided into three classes: (1) Assistants and representatives of the
count not restricted to one part of his district. (2) Superintendents of
a subdivision of the county. (3) Different officials of private landowners,
local superintendents, or town officials for special, particularly military,
matters. In the first group the missi of the counts and the "viscounts"
can be reckoned, although a definite office of this kind can hardly be
assumed. We must rather suppose that a count frequently appointed
one of his subordinate officials, a centenarius and "vicar" to take his
place, but only temporarily, and that in such cases this subordinate
appeared as missus or "viscount. " To the second group belongs above
all the centenarius, the old Frankish official, who must be identified1 with
the "Thunginus" of the Salic "Volksrecht," the old national judge,
who was forced into dependence upon the king's officials, the counts, and
restricted to the administration of justice in minor matters, in order to
leave the higher entirely to the count. To the centenarius corresponds
the vicar. It is quite clear that under Charles the Great a division of
the counties into centenaries and vicariates was everywhere carried out,
at least in the middle and western counties of the Empire. To these
subdivisions of the West corresponded the Goe of Saxony, and to the
Frankish centenarii and vicars the Saxon Gogrqfen. To the third group
belong not only the superintendents of the royal domains called
Judices and other officials of these domains like the vUlici, who later
were found everywhere, but above all the tribunes (tribuni) and mayors
(scultheti), who are found in smaller districts as executive officials.
Tribuni and scultheti are, from the first, not names for a uniform
lower office but for different, though similar, subordinate officials—
there were scultheti of the king, the count, the private landowner, and
others.
But great as were the differences among the officials in the State,
and great as was the concession made to the peculiarities of the different
peoples and to different local needs, yet Charles knew how to retain in
his own hands perfect control over the whole. Indeed it was characteristic
of his government that all who had public duties to perform, or who had
to provide for the maintenance of Law and Order even in the smallest
districts, were controlled by the State and made responsible to the State.
The authority of the State did not draw back before private ownership.
It pressed forward everywhere. The counts supervised not only their
own subordinates but also the officials of ecclesiastical and secular lords.
1 That is the general older view which H. Brunner has tried to set aside, but in
my opinion unsuccessfully. He wishes to make a sharp distinction between the
Centenariu* and the Thunginut.
## p. 682 (#714) ############################################
682 The missi dominici
All belonged to the one great organism, to the universal State, in the
centre of which stood the monarch himself.
But how could the centre remain in living connexion with distant
parts and with the provincial officers? To solve this problem was the
task of the missi dominici, perhaps the most peculiar of all the Carlo-
vingian institutions.
The summit of the Carlovingian constitution was the organisation
of the office of the king's envoys, the missi dominici. These were not
intended to take the place of the dukes removed by the Carlovingians,
nor to be bearers of a provincial authority, but to bring the king's
will into the provinces, and to render possible an immediate connexion
of the people with the supreme government of the Empire. As in
all institutions, so here too Charles made a link with what had long
existed, while transforming it into something essentially new. The
Merovingians had already employed missi in different kinds of state
business, military, judicial, administrative, fiscal. But it was always
particular and special duty which the missus had to perform by the
king's commission. In the later Merovingian period this institution
fell into disuse, and it was not till the time of the Carlovingian mayors
of the palace that it was revived. From the time of Charles Martel
occurs the designation missi discurrentes. Whether that really signifies
that missi were sent out to travel over a definite district, to control
all officials and supplement their work, and whether the missi then
possessed full powers generally, cannot be decided. But it was certainly
so in the first years in the reign of Charles the Great, who made the
missi discurrentes, the travelling envoys, a regular institution of the
State. From 779 the missi appear with the quite general function
adjustitiasfaciendas, i. e. to preserve the right in every direction. They
acted with the counts, and eventually against them, for the adminis-
tration of justice; they watched the work of the judges, and themselves
held a court; they took steps for the improvement of ecclesiastical
affairs with or without the bishop, they inspected the monasteries,
and they superintended all officials.
Extensive as were the duties of these missi even at the beginning of
Charles' reign, and essential as was their work for the organisation of
the Empire, yet the whole institution only reached its full development
after Charles' coronation as emperor through edicts of the Diet held
at Aachen in the year 802'. Charles no longer wished, so report the
Annals of Lorsch, to send out as missi vassals who possessed no lands.
He appointed rather archbishops, bishops, and abbots, with dukes and
counts, in whose case bribery need not be feared.
On broad lines, their duties were characterised generally in a
capitulary of 802, the particulars being appended in a long list. The
1 The result of the investigations of Waitz (cf. m. p. 451) remains unshaken,
even after the further work of Krause.
## p. 683 (#715) ############################################
The missi dominici 683
whole institution, which had long established itself, now appears raised
and made permanent. The Empire was divided into large fixed districts
(missatica, legatUmes), perhaps partly already in such a way as is testified
for the time of Louis the Pious, or perhaps the missatka then corre-
sponded to the metropolitan provinces.
Every year these envoys were sent out, generally two or three
together, under Charles frequently an ecclesiastic and a layman. They
received instructions, directions arranged in sections respecting their
official duties, in which too were included general orders to be com-
municated to the officials and people of the Missaticum (capitvla
missorum). They had to give a report of their work, as a rule
probably at a meeting of the Empire, to make inquiries in case of
doubt and to obtain new decisions from the monarch or the meeting.
The missus was to enter into communication both with the officials and
also with the people themselves, for to afford assistance against oppres-
sion and violence even of the officials was the most important duty of
the royal envoys. For this reason they were required to hold general
meetings. According to a decree of Louis the Pious, this general meeting
was to take place in the middle of May, but of course in case of need it
could be divided into several meetings to be held in different places.
Here the bishops, abbots, counts, royal stewards, and representatives
of the abbesses had to appear, and every count had to bring with him
his vicars, centenars, and three or four of the judges. At these provincial
assemblies the envoy sought to obtain disclosures of the affairs of his
province through the statements of those dwelling in the gaus, who
were bound to truth by oath, and of witnesses of crimes. Abuses were
removed, bad officials brought to account or even summoned before the
king. That this arrangement already existed under Charles may be
taken as proved. In addition to these assemblies, the envoys also held
special courts of justice in the different judicial divisions of their
provinces. They were, however, not to injure but merely to control
and supplement the judicial work of the regular judges, especially the
counts. Hence their judicial duties were limited to four months,
January, April, July, October, while the remaining months were
reserved for the courts of the counts.
In each of these four months,
Charles ordered courts to be held at different places with the count
of the district. At other times the envoys travelled about, inspected
churches and monasteries, and everywhere saw that things were in order.
Together with the regular envoys, extraordinary envoys were still used
as of old on special missions, whether military, judicial, or ecclesiastical.
But no great significance was ever attached to them. The importance
of the whole institution rests purely on the regular envoys.
The purpose of the centralisation finds expression in this endeavour
to preserve the unity of the whole while justifiable local differences
were recognised. Unity was to be in the kingdom. Because the
## p. 684 (#716) ############################################
684 The Empire
king could not appear everywhere in person, his place was taken by
men who were to be regarded as his representatives. Herein lies the
essential character of the whole institution—arrangements were made
which enabled the king to appear personally active in all parts of the
Empire. The fundamental idea of the purely personal and immediate
government of the monarch is thus realised. In this peculiarity lay
the strength, but at the same time also the weakness, of the institu-
tion itself. Its strength shewed itself in the fact that thereby an immense
influence of the king was made possible, and all things were quickened
from the centre. Its weakness was seen in the excessive dependence
for strength on the personality of the monarch, and in the failure of
continuous and immediate influence of the royal authority from the
moment the central power failed. The institution had no strength of
its own, it was absolutely dependent on the circumstances of the court.
And when the influence from the centre, which under Charles had been
so vigorous and powerful, ceased in the later years of Louis the Pious,
the institution of the royal envoys became degenerate. It either ceased
entirely or it became territorial and thereby was robbed of its proper
and original living principle.
Nothing manifests so clearly the whole inner development of the
unified Carlovingian State as the history of the royal envoys. Nothing
reveals more surely the peculiar nature of the State than this one
institution.
The universal empire of the great Charles could not long outlive its
founder. General forces certainly were in existence which assisted the
unification, such as the thought of universal unity which proceeded
from the ecclesiastical conception and from the Roman Empire. It is
true that the genius of Charles made these ideas of unity serviceable to
his efforts for power. But he failed to equalise the diverging intel-
lectual and material needs of the different peoples subjected to his
rule. And he failed to erect a bureaucracy strong in itself and not
absolutely dependent upon the changeable circumstances of the court.
A bureaucracy certainly was erected; but a bureaucracy of a peculiar
kind, a patriarchal bureaucracy. Such a one has no independent strength
of its own, it shares for the most part the fate of the ruling family, and
is chiefly supported by the ability of the monarch. If this fails, then
the State itself fails. To create anything enduring of this kind was
beyond the power even of Charles the Great.
It was not the advance of the feudal system that brought about the
early collapse of the Carlovingian Empire. The feudal system only
furnished the outer form and the external support for the decomposing
tendencies. These had their root in the nature of the social development
of the Western peoples themselves, in general factors of their civilisation
both material and mental, and also in the personal character of the
leaders of the State.
## p. 685 (#717) ############################################
685
CHAPTER XXII.
THE PAPACY, TO CHARLES THE GREAT.
The growth of the papal power can be regarded from two standpoints
according as we interpret the expression in an earthly or a spiritual
sense. Are we to regard the popes as rulers over large domains and at
times the most powerful of Italian princes; or are we to look on them
as the heads of Western Christendom, the supreme arbiters of religion
and morals from Iceland to Sicily, from the Atlantic to the eastern out-
skirts of Germany and Hungary? At the beginning of the seventh
century they were neither, and by the end of the eleventh they were
both. Till 1859 their secular dominion remained unimpaired in extent,
and since 1517 they have ceased to exercise undisputed moral authority
in Western Christendom. In 1870 the last vestige of their temporal
power was wrested from their grasp, yet in the same year they made
claims to a spiritual authority which would not have been conceded to
them by the Church even when their influence was paramount. Closely
interwoven therefore as are the temporal and spiritual powers of the
Papacy, they are not identical; and however difficult it may be to
separate one from the other, they must be distinguished. Yet in the
present case it is necessary to deal with the subject from both aspects,
paying special attention to the question of the process of the liberation
of the Papacy from influences which might subsequently have controlled
or fettered its development.
Gregory the Great is said to have originated the medieval Papacy;
and this is in part true, though it took nearly three centuries after his
work was done to produce the first of the medieval popes. Nicolas I
inaugurated the line of priest-kings of Western Christendom in a truer
sense than Gregory I. It is true that the earlier pontiff' was far the
greater man; but the office he filled was less in the eyes of his con-
temporaries; and he was obliged to address kings and princes in a more
submissive tone than that employed by Nicolas in the ninth century.
Gregory was, in fact, a great subject, possessed of vast estates and
considerable wealth, able to exercise a powerful influence on the politics
of his age, to arrange treaties and to delimit frontiers. But, though a
great noble, he was not a sovereign prince, his lands were estates, not
Oil. XXII.
## p. 686 (#718) ############################################
686 Progress of the Lombards
dominions; he spoke to emperors and kings not as their equal but as a
subordinate; he even judged them from the standpoint of an inferior.
Nicolas I on the other hand was lord paramount in his own dominion,
and addressed the princes of Western Europe with the authority of a
ruler on earth, vested with spiritual powers which rendered him infinitely
their superior. The task before us is to trace how this came about,
shewing the successive stages by which the Roman pontiffs asserted their
independence of all secular authority. It is this which differentiates the
Papacy from every other Christian bishopric, making it both a temporal
and a spiritual power, and the accomplishment of this took place between
a. d. 604 and 868, though this chapter concludes with the year 800.
The immediate successors of Gregory the Great do not appear to
have given much promise of the future eminence of the throne they
occupied. The popes of the seventh century succeeded one another
with suspicious rapidity, few occupying the See of Rome for more than
a few years. Appointed by permission of the Emperor or his repre-
sentative in Italy, the exarch of Ravenna, the pontiffs submitted themselves
to the secular power, and felt its heavy hand whenever they presumed to
resist the imperial commands even in matters spiritual; nor was it till
the eighth century, when the Lombards were extruding the Greeks, as
the imperialists of Constantinople had already begun to be called, from
the shores of Italy, that a series of greater popes, more fortunate than
their predecessors in the duration of their pontificates, were able to assert
and maintain their authority. Then it was that the Lombards, who
had captured Ravenna, and extended their influence to the South of
Italy and were preparing to occupy the ducatus Romae, found themselves
confronted by the Roman pontiffs claiming to represent the majesty of
the Empire and to seize those prerogatives which, as they maintained,
had only been wrested from the hands of the Greeks in order to revert
to Rome and its chief priest.
Thus began those extraordinary negotiations between the popes and
the Frankish rulers, who with the sanction of St Peter were transformed
first into native kings and finally into emperors and legitimate lords of
the Roman world. In gratitude for these services the kings of the
Franks and emperors of the Romans made over to the See of Rome
certain parts of northern and central Italy which had belonged to the
Empire in the seventh century.
At the same time, whilst the popes were consolidating their authority
over Christendom and their dominion in Italy by diplomacy, their power
was being strengthened by the assertion of legal claims to all privileges
which the reverence of princes was bestowing upon them. Appeals to
the antiquity rather of the imagination than of history attempted to
shew that the claims of the Roman See were based on immemorial rights
or on the acts of emperors whose names, already half legendary in the
West, were bound up with the vanished glories of imperial days. The
/
## p. 687 (#719) ############################################
Ideals of the Age 687
false decretals and the donation of Constantine were demonstrating that
nothing which the popes could receive or demand was beyond their
rights, and casting a false glamour of legality over any claims they
might choose to make.
In dealing with the strange and wonderful history before us it is
remarkable that we meet with comparatively few noteworthy characters
or dramatic incidents if we except Charles the Great and his coronation
at Rome. Hardly any literature worthy of the name illumines our
path, and the verses which have come down to us are sufficient to shew
that poetry was a lost art. The revival of civilisation and government
under Charles is only remarkable because of the darkness which preceded
and followed it, and the two striking features of the age, the rise of
Islam and the revival of the Roman Empire in the East after a series of
unparalleled disasters, do not come into our purview of events. Despite
all this the squalor which surrounds the period is brightened by the
presence of great ideals, which men kept in their minds and before their
eyes, though they were unable to give them form or substance. The
remedy for the anarchy of Western Europe was sought in the ideal
which the Roman Empire had left, a unity of government for the human
race; and men's eyes were turned to Christian Rome to provide what
was so sorely needed. The faith in Jesus Christ went far beyond the
Roman law in recognising the unity of mankind; and from it, as
embodied in the Roman Church, the inheritor of the city which had
been mistress of the world, the Frankish monarchs hoped that a Christian
Empire would arise to federate humanity. For centuries successive
generations persevered in carrying out this idea; and who can deny that
it was a grand and noble one? The rise of the papal power is one of
the most important events in modern history because it was inspired by
the motive which dominated the best thinkers of the Middle Ages and
raised their impotent efforts above the sordid policy of our own day.
Even the completeness of their failure does not rob them of the glory of
having seen great visions and dreamed splendid dreams.
The rise of the papal power was due alike to the necessity of
political independence and to the circumstances which freed the popes
from the domination of the emperors in Constantinople and the Lombard
conquerors of Italy, and enabled them to secure the assistance of the
Franks from beyond the Alps: it was due still more to the disintegration
of the Empire of Charles the Great under his unfortunate successors. It
will perhaps be of assistance to us if each of these be taken separately.
We will therefore discuss (1) the Papacy and the Eastern emperors,
(2) the Lombards, (3) the Franks, and the new Western Empire.
(1) Since the outbreak of the Arian dispute the eastern provinces
had never known the meaning of religious peace, though the way in
which that controversy had ended might have encouraged hopes that
similar differences were not incapable of adjustment. Despite the
/'
## p. 688 (#720) ############################################
688 Rome and Church Doctrine [481-52S
attempt of Constantius to coerce his subjects to unity in his struggle
with Athanasius and despite the feebler efforts of Valens, the question was
allowed much freedom of debate; and the creed of Nicaea, as explained
by the wisdom of the Cappadocian fathers, was ultimately accepted bv
all. But the unfortunate dispute concerning the Two Natures of our
Lord, partly owing to the unscrupulous character of those who engaged in
it, and partly to the mutual jealousies of the great patriarchates of the
East, produced schisms which seriously threatened the peace of the
Empire, and ultimately lost it some of its most important provinces.
In this great dispute Rome twice intervened, first in favour of Cyril in
condemnation of Nestorius, and later in opposition to Dioscorus against
Eutyches. On the latter occasion the pope, Leo the Great, put forward
his famous Tome, which the Western Church considered to be a fitting
end to the whole controversy. Not so thought many of the Oriental
Churches; especially those of Egypt and Syria, by whom the proceedings
of the Council of Chalcedon were regarded as an insult to Cyril, the
revered head of the Alexandrian Church. In Constantinople, a city
which gained an evil name for the formidable character of its riots and
seditions, parties were evenly divided between the upholders and opponents
of the Council of Chalcedon, between whom the reigning Emperor
endeavoured often in vain to hold the balance, generally at the cost of
being denounced as a heretic and traitor to the Faith.
Policy seemed to require that the Church should come to some such
agreement as was arrived at in the Arian controversy, during which the
work of the Council of Nicaea, without being repudiated, was some-
what modified and explained. In like manner it was hoped that the
ambiguities of the Council of Chalcedon would be removed by the
conciliatory action of the ecclesiastical authority backed by that of
the Emperor. In the Christian East matters of religion and doctrine
had always been considered to lie within the sphere of the imperial
prerogative, and the Emperor regarded himself as even more than the
clergy responsible for the maintenance of the purity of the faith. But
to the Western ecclesiastics the faith as defined by Leo was not to be
explained but accepted with unquestioning obedience, and any attempt
to reopen the question was an insult to his memory and to the Roman
See. Accordingly, when at the instigation of Acacius of Constantinople,
Zeno sanctioned (481) the Henoticon, or scheme of union with the
I Monophysites, the Roman Church broke off all intercourse with that of
Constantinople. Fortunately for the prestige of the popes, Italy was
under the government first of Odovacar and afterwards of Theodoric,
both of whom were barbarians professing Arianism, and no intervention
from Constantinople was possible. Till a. d. 519 the Old and the New
Rome remained in a condition of religious separation, and union was
only brought about by the submission of the Church of the new capital.
With the accession of Justinian (527) and the subjugation of Italy
## p. 689 (#721) ############################################
535-610] Emperors dictate to the Church 689
by the Byzantines (535-553) the Papacy entered upon a series of
humiliations which no barbarian ruler had even dreamed of inflicting
upon it. The loyalty and submission displayed by the popes is a proof
of the awe in which they held the majesty of the Empire.
The attitude of Justinian towards the Roman Church was frankly
autocratic: he expected and exacted obedience. For the early part of
his reign he favoured the orthodox, whilst his wife, the powerful
Empress Theodora, inclined to the Monophysite party. But at her
death Justinian inclined to a compromise suggested to him by Theodore
Askidas, bishop of Caesarea. Briefly, this was to condemn the writings
of three divines specially obnoxious to the Monophysites, whilst other-
wise maintaining the dignity of the Fourth General Council. Justinian
has been reproached for devoting his time to the study of theology
instead of attending to the politics of his empire; but in truth, its
tranquillity mainly depended on the theological question, and the Emperor
hoped that in condemning Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret's writings
against Cyril, and the letter of Ibas to Maris the Persian he would
render the settlement at Chalcedon acceptable to his Egyptian and
other Monophysite subjects. Such was the political aim of the otherwise
uninteresting controversy of the "Three Chapters. " That the Roman
See would oppose the imperial policy was inevitable, especially as the
three writers condemned had been acquitted at Chalcedon, and to doubt
the justice of the acts of this council was disloyalty to the memory of
Pope Leo. But Justinian was not accustomed to allow his will to be
disputed. Pope Vigilius was hurried from Rome to Constantinople and
forced to assent to the condemnation of the Chapters at the Fifth General
Council (553). Never had a pope, at any rate since the days of Liberius,
endured such a humiliation. So fully was this realised in the West that
the churches of Illyricum and Istria made the weakness of Vigilius,
hampered as he was by the promises exacted by the Empress Theodora as
the price of his consecration, the pretext of a schism which lasted for a
generation or more.
The disasters which overtook the Eastern Empire in the seventh
century might well excuse any attempt to procure ecclesiastical unity.
More and more the divisions of the Church were becoming tokens of
national rather than religious sympathy. The Monophysite in Egypt
believed in One nature in Christ, not because he was a theologian but
because he was the natural enemy of the Melchite or Greek Christians
who declared that Christ was " in Two Natures. " The century had opened
with the remarkable successes of the Persians, who seemed to have
wrested from the Romans the domination of the East and to have
restored their Empire to the extent it had reached in the days of
Cambyses. The overthrow of the despicable Phocas (610), however,
made way for a monarch who, had he died a few years earlier than he
did, would have been comparable to Alexander the Great. Heraclius
C. MED. II. VOL. II. CH. XXII. 44
## p. 690 (#722) ############################################
690 Monotheletism and the Papacy [c. 630-715
rolled back the tide of conquest, restored the frontiers of the Empire,
recovered the Holy Cross, and humiliated Persia. Is it to be wondered at,
therefore, that the victorious Emperor should have made another attempt
to reunite the Christians, and have listened to those who suggested that,
if it could be acknowledged that in our Lord were two natures—the
human and the divine—and but one working energy (ivepyeia Bpaa-riKij),
Monophysites would unite with the supporters of Chalcedon? To this
Honorius (pope 625-638) was disposed to assent, and in his correspondence
he used the term " one will" (una voluntas) as applying to the Saviour.
Hence the controversy is known as the Monothelete. But the action of
Honorius was profoundly unpopular in Rome; and the successes of the
Muslims and the loss of Egypt and Syria were regarded as a just punish-
ment of the heresy of Heraclius as expressed in his Ekthesis.
The Monothelete controversy was fraught with humiliation for the
See of Rome. Constans II (641-668), the brutal grandson of Heraclius,
issued his Type in favour of Monothelete views; and, because he was
opposed by Pope Martin V, he ordered the exarch Theodore Calliopas
to seize the recalcitrant pontiff and bring him to Constantinople. There
the Roman bishop, after enduring insult and imprisonment, which were
unable to break his spirit, was deposed and banished by imperial decree
to the Crimea, where he died deserted by his friends, a martyr for the
faith as defined by his great predecessor Leo. During the reign of
Constantine Pogonatus, in the pontificate of Agatho (678-682), the
Roman See obtained some reparation for the insults heaped on Martin.
At the Sixth General Council, which met in Constantinople 7 Nov. 680,
the Monothelete doctrine was condemned, and with it its supporters,
Cyrus, bishop of Alexandria, and two patriarchs of Constantinople,
Sergius and Pyrrhus. In addition to these, a unique circumstance in
ecclesiastical history, the General Council pronounced Pope Honorius to
be anathema non quidem ut haereticus sed ut haereticorum fautor. Thus
the Roman See had to accept the deep humiliation of having one of its
occupants pronounced unsound in a matter of faith.
A further insult was still in store for the Papacy. In 692 another
council was summoned to Constantinople for the purpose of completing
the work of the Sixth Council by drawing up canons of discipline. This
Synod, generally known as the Council in Trullo, passed its canons and
sent them for ratification to Pope Sergius, and on his refusal to
acknowledge the work of the Council the Protospatharius was sent to
arrest him and he was threatened with the fate of St Martin. The
Romans however stood by their bishop and rescued him from the
imperial officer.
The last pope to be summoned to Constantinople was Constantine
(708-715), who came at the invitation of Justinian II (Rhinotmetus).
He was, however, treated with honour by that formidable emperor and
returned in safety in 711 to Rome.
## p. 691 (#723) ############################################
715-731] Iconoclasm 691
We have now reached the period of the last struggle between
Constantinople and Rome, due, like the Three Chapters in the days of
Justinian I and the Monothelete controversy in the following century,
to another amazing display of the strength inherent in the Empire. In
the famous "Isaurian11 dynasty the Graeco-Roman power, which had
been threatened at its very source by the triumphant Caliphs, once more
shewed itself the strongest force in the world. Again orthodoxy made
overtures of peace to Monophysitism, but in a very different form from
those of the sixth and seventh centuries. The schismatic or heretical
churches, whether Nestorian or Monophysite, shewed a conservatism
greater than that exhibited by the Catholics in maintaining a simplicity
in church ornamentation which orthodoxy had long abandoned. The
images or pictures, originally introduced, to use the words of John of
Damascus, as "books for the unlearned,11 had not found a place in the
Monophysite or Nestorian churches; but among the orthodox had
become objects of superstitious reverence. To remove this scandal
and to save the Church from the reproach of Jews and Muslims as
well as to conciliate the Christians outside its pale, Leo the Isaurian in
726 issued his celebrated edict against the images and inaugurated the
Iconoclastic controversy. Since the Monophysites opposed the attempt
to represent the human appearance of our Lord as contrary to their
doctrine of the loss of his manhood in the infinity of his Godhead, the
edict was sure to find favour in their eyes1.
It is not easy to determine the precise effect of the Iconoclastic decree
on the Roman Church. Certainly Leo the Isaurian1s reign saw the
beginning of the complete abandonment of the exarchate of Ravenna
and its dependencies by the Greeks. Letters survive, professedly by
Pope Gregory II (715-731) to Leo, denouncing him with the utmost
violence and defending the image-worship with as grotesque an ignorance
of the Old Testament as of the rules of common courtesy. It is now
generally supposed, however, that these two letters are spurious, alien as
they are to what we know of the wise and prudent man which Gregory II
shewed himself in his other dealings. Nor does there seem to have been
any formal breach between the Papacy and Constantinople. Down to
the end of the eighth century the popes acknowledged the Emperor.
But the chain was really broken. The Lombards took Ravenna,
occupied the Pentapolis and began to threaten the ducatus Romae,
already a virtually independent state with an army commanded by its
Duke, and with the Pope almost acknowledged as the representative of
the Emperor. When Ravenna was taken is unknown: the whole history
of the period is obscure; all that can be said with certainty is that by
1 The origin of the Iconoclastic controversy will be related elsewhere. It may
have been partly due to the antagonism between the Asiatic (from which the army
was mainly recruited) and the Hellenic elements of the Empire. So Brehier, La
Querelle des Images (Paris, 1904).
ch. xxii. 44—2
## p. 692 (#724) ############################################
692 Precarious position of the Papacy [c. 739-754
7 July 751 the exarchate had come to an end and the Greeks were no
longer a power in Italy. The Pope had also lost his Sicilian estates
which afforded his principal revenue. The experience the Papacy had
gained by its connexion with Constantinople was not forgotten, and
moulded its subsequent policy. It became evident that to work out its
destiny it needed alike freedom and protection—freedom to assert its
claims to rule over the conscience of mankind, and protection from the
enemies who encompassed the defenceless city.
Neither of these could the Byzantine government afford. The
Lombards were pressing closer on Rome, and no prospect of aid from
the Emperor was at hand; and in any case it would be too great a
price to yield to his demands in matters theological. The aims of the
Empire and the East were distinct from those of Rome and the West.
In the latter there was practically no great religious difference, and the
priests, secure in their monopoly of learning, were unlikely to disturb
men's minds by explaining the traditional faith or adapting it to the
conditions of the hour. In the more educated East questions of the
utmost moment caused serious divisions among clergy and laity alike;
nor is it without significance that Pope Agatho had to explain to the
Sixth General Council that his delegates were rude and unlettered men
who had to live by the labour of their hands. So far then were the
rough and ignorant clergy even of Rome removed from their brethren of
the East. But, though ignorant of the arts of life, the Roman clergy
haul one distinct advantage over the more cultured ecclesiastics of Con-
stantinople. They had fought a long and stubborn battle with the
barbarian invaders of Italy with no one to come to their aid, and in the
struggle they had developed political instincts denied to the servants of
a political and spiritual despotism. Thus the popes of the eighth century
learned the statecraft with which their successors were to raise the papal
power to its highest pitch. From the birth of Christ there is approxi-
mately as long an interval backwards to Romulus as forwards to the
political severance of Rome from the Empire, and at the latter period
the foundations of a world-governing power were as surely laid as when
the first king built the walls of Rome.
(2) The Lombard invaders of Italy after a long struggle had
succeeded in dispossessing the Empire of all pretence to exercise
sovereignty in Italy. They had made their appearance in the year 568
under Alboin, and though Paul the Deacon testifies to the comparative
mildness of their rule at first, on the death of Alboin it became
intolerable. Two facts are worth bearing in mind, namely that the
Lombards are the first invaders of Italy who settled with no sort of
imperial sanction—Alaric, Odovacar and Theodoric having all had
recognition from the Roman government; and further that under their
occupation the theory of a united Italy was abandoned, never to be
realised till the nineteenth century. There was further a sort of
## p. 693 (#725) ############################################
673-675] Lombard and Roman territory 693
undeveloped feudalism in the Lombard settlement by which the
kingdom was divided into more or less independent dukedoms, some—
like those of Spoleto and Benevento—eventually detaching themselves
completely from the king's authority. After the death of Alboin in 578
there were no less than thirty-six dukes each exercising unrestrained the
power of a petty tyrant. But anarchical as was the condition of affairs
among the Lombards at the close of the sixth century, it was becoming
evident that the Byzantine government was powerless to expel them
from Italy and even that its abandonment of the peninsula was only a
matter of time.
The condition of Byzantine Italy was not altogether dissimilar from
that of the Lombard territory. As at Pavia, the capital of the king, so
at the exarch's seat at Ravenna, the central authority was at times
deplorably weak; and in both cases the "dukes" were practically
independent princes. The duke of Naples for example was as little
amenable to the exarch as the Lombard dukes of Benevento were to
their sovereign. The difficulty was principally one of communication.
The Lombards held the country and the Byzantines the coast, and
unless the road between Rome and Ravenna could be kept open it
was impossible for the exarch to govern, succour, or advise the Pope;
and in one case a pope's enthronement had to be deferred for more than
a year owing to the difficulty in obtaining confirmation of his election.
Hence it was of the utmost importance to keep open the Flaminian
way leading from Rome to Ravenna and the coast, and the possession
of such places as Perugia was vital to the Romans.
The territory occupied in Italy by the Lombards and the exarchate
in Italy respectively, say during the pontificate of Gregory I (590-604),
was approximately as follows. The Byzantines on the east coast held
Istria on the Adriatic, the islands along the coast already known as
Venetia, the marshes around Comacchio and Ferrara, the mouth of
the Po where Ravenna is situated, and inland as far as Bologna.
Practically from Venetia to Ancona the frontiers of the Empire were the
Apennines and the sea. Then came a very debatable territory giving
access by way of Perugia to the Roman duchy. Proceeding south-
ward, Calabria remained imperial till 675, when Brindisi and Tarento
fell into the hands of Romuald, duke of Benevento, and Bruttium
and Sicily were held by the Greeks. On the western coast were two
duchies, Naples and Rome. The Roman duchy was constantly shrinking
owing to the encroachments of the Lombard dukes of Benevento and
Spoleto, the latter having pushed his frontier almost to the N. E. wall
of the city, his boundary being the old Sabine one formed by the Tiber
and the Anio. The rest of Italy was held by the Lombards, the
valley of the Po being more directly under the authority of the king,
whose capital was Pavia, whilst the three great almost independent
duchies were Friuli (Forum Julii), north of Venetia, Spoleto, extending
## p. 694 (#726) ############################################
694 The Conflict unavoidable [593-741
from the Pentapolis to the Roman duchy, and Benevento in the south.
that laws were not to be made without the co-operation of those
classes for whom they were intended, the summons to a Diet of those
concerned was clearly sufficient. For the participation of the people
ended with participation of the subjects in Diets. That is the fixed
principle of the Frankish State to which all accounts of the legislation
of the Frankish kings point.
In connexion with the contrast of Folkright and King's Law, the
Carlovingian Capitularies which deal with secular matters, and from
which only Capitularies containing ecclesiastical regulations are to be
separated, are commonly divided into three groups according to contents,
origin, and period of validity: (1) Capitula legibus addenda, (2) Capitula
per se scribenda, (3) Capitula missorum. The first are said to contain
those decrees which modify or supplement laws of the Folkright; the
second to refer to such ordinances as concerned the relation of the
subjects to the Empire; the third to be instructions for the king's
envoys. The first, according to the usual view, were raised to law by
a decision of the people; the second were called into existence on the
ground of an agreement of king and Diet and did not claim lasting
validity; the third owed their origin to the personal decision of the
monarch alone and were of merely temporary validity. The first
embrace Folkright; the second King's Law; the third administrative
measures.
This favourite differentiation1 proceeds from modern legal conceptions
and reads them into an age that knew nothing of such legal differences,
and could not know. When several explanations were necessary at the
same time for one Folkright—the Lex Salica, Ripuaria, or the Lex Baiu-
varwrum, or when numerous supplements to the leges generally were to be
issued, it was the custom at the king's court to combine them in special
ordinances, in Capitula legibus addenda. If, however, there were only
a few points of the law in question to be explained, while other legal
measures were to be taken at the same time, they were all combined in
one ordinance. But of a different origin and of a different validity there
is no trace. Whether the penal or judicial clauses occur in a capitulary
which simply contains analogous regulations supplementing the rules of
a Folkright, or whether they occur in a law referring to matters of a
1 Started by Boretius, adopted by many investigators.
ch. xxi. 43—2
## p. 676 (#708) ############################################
676 The Capitularies
different character, there is no hint of a different origin, and scarcely of
a difference in validity, for this was quite independent of the intrinsic
significance of the law. That was merely the consequence of a purely
external method of legislating applied according to circumstances. It
was only applied according to circumstances, for the great mass of extant
capitularies shew that the Carlovingians did not and could not know
anything of the principles of a threefold division. If we disregard the
not very numerous Carlovingian capitularies that can be reckoned a*
Capitula legibus addenda, and if we also disregard those ordinances
which are evidently instructions for the king's envoys, there remains
the great mass of the capitularies, containing regulations of the most
different kinds, judicial and administrative regulations, ordinances for
the army, for the administration of justice, for the Church, and in civil
matters. That is characteristic of the whole government under Charles
the Great—the needs of the moment are satisfied. To the king's court
came complaints, requests, inquiries, which were dealt with by the king
and councillors or in some cases by the assembled Diet. As ecclesi-
astical regulations were frequently grouped together in independent
ordinances, so occasionally—when the subject required or permitted it—
were single groups of secular ordinances: instructions, supplements, or
modifications of leges. But what had by chance been jointly debated
and decided could also just as well be comprehended in a law. This
was carried out on no intentional system. Rather, the want of a
system was characteristic. Significant is the attempt of the State to
provide for the development of the Law by numerous disconnected
measures to meet special needs of the moment. There was nothing
like a principle of difference between law and prescript, nor even a
clear difference between legislation and administration.
Two powers were in operation: King and People. They worked in
harmony, they also worked in opposition. A conflict between popular
influence and royal influence necessarily manifested itself in the restricted
sphere of the Frankish tribe from the moment that the monarchy in
its excessive strength arose as a new independent power. But it was
seen still more significantly in the districts of those other Germanic
tribes which had been brought into subjection by the Frankish king and
possessed a copious system of Law independently developed, and which
were now to be embraced in the unity of the Frankish Empire. But the
conflict of popular and royal influences was not limited to the sphere of
legislation. It naturally became prominent in all spheres of corporate
life. The consideration of the administration of the provinces under
Charles will also shew this—the ancient popular institutions on the one
hand, the new desired by the central authority on the other.
The Carlovingian government of the provinces was based upon the
system of counties. The whole Empire was divided into districts, at
the head of which stood counts, an old institution already known under
## p. 677 (#709) ############################################
Local Govei-nment 677
the Merovingians, but first consistently and fully used by Charles the
Great. Thereby a long process was brought to a close, a process of
competition between the institutions desired by the Frankish govern-
ment and the ancient institutions of the different tribes and districts
incorporated into the Frankish State. We are often no longer able to
recognise what existed before the Frankish conquest, and how it was
overcome by institutions of the Frankish kingdom. But there had
been a long struggle between the two forces—between the old popular
institutions on the one hand, and those proceeding from the Frankish
authority on the other. In this sense there was a significant opposition
of popular and royal influences, of Folkright and King's Law. Gradually
we can observe the advance of what was desired by the central authority.
When the Merovingians conquered Gaul and extended their rule
over different tribes of the Germanic East, they did not abolish the
national institutions altogether. Just as they left to the different
peoples their own Law, so they left them also their national insti-
tutions. The tribal authorities largely remained, and were merely
brought into a condition of dependence, looser or closer. But the
process of centralisation was continued by the Carlovingians and per-
fected by Charles the Great. The old institution of Herzog, or Duke,
partly local ruler, partly local official, was set aside—a characteristic piece
of internal policy. Duke Tassilo of Bavaria was the last representative
of the internal ducal authority. After his deposition in the year 788,
the Bavarian district was linked on to the usual Frankish county
administration. Only among the Basques in Vasconia and the Bretons
in Brittany are the native dukes, in the old Merovingian sense, still
to be found, even under Charles. Elsewhere dukes are met with, but
not as independent representatives of local popular authority. They are
merely officials of the king, furnished with extraordinary military power,
to whom—sometimes only temporarily—larger provincial districts were
assigned or special full powers on the borders of the Empire. Their
office, however, as a regular part of the constitution was unknown
under Charles. The provincial division of the land rested upon one
indispensable basis—the division into counties.
Naturally, on the introduction of this system, former divisions of the
people and land were utilised. In Roman Gaul, the old town districts,
the civitates, became the Frankish counties, Gaue or districts; in the
purely German parts, the old divisions of people and land which some-
times corresponded to the old German tribes. How far old divisions
were utilised or new ones created is, from the nature of the case, not
open to investigation in particular instances. One thing must be
clearly kept in mind in all examinations of the territorial division
of the Frankish as of the later States—the designation Gau (i. e. District,
Latin Pagus) very often refers to the county, but not always. It would
be a mistake, though it has often been made, to regard every Gau as a
CH. XXI.
## p. 678 (#710) ############################################
678 Gaue. Comites
future county. Gau also occurs from the very beginning as the name
of other administrative districts besides those of the county. It
occurs moreover as a purely geographical description without reference
to a definite administrative district. Gau and county were frequently
synonymous, but occasionally were different from the beginning.
Under Charles the Great the county is the administrative district
simply, the natural base of all state activities. Wherever this system
of counties was wanting in Charles' Empire, the imperial authority
purposely abstained from a real incorporation of that district into the
Empire. We may say definitely that the measure of the realisation of
the system of counties shews us the measure of acceptance of the imperial
power itself.
The garafio {gerefa, greva) the Franks had already possessed before
the foundation of the Empire. Comites were already known in the
Merovingian age as powerful officials of the Gaulish civitates. For
some time graf and comes stood side by side in the Merovingian
kingdom. Not certainly in the same gau. The relation is rather to be
so understood as that the Roman districts in connexion with older
arrangements possessed comites, while the purely Frankish districts had
graf8. The distinction soon disappeared. The comes adopted much from
the graf, the graf much from the comes, and there arose the single office
of graf under the Frankish monarchy. The graf is the definite organ of
royal government in judicial, fiscal, military, and administrative respects.
The usual official title for the graf is under Charles the Great the
Latin word comes, and more rarely the less definite expressions prae-
fectus, praeses, rector, and also consul.
Charles disposed of the office as he thought fit. No general uniform
principle directed the choice of men. Largely it was eminent Franks
who were placed in important posts of trust, whether in Franconia
itself or in conquered districts to maintain the authority of the Empire
in face of the native chiefs. Occasionally, however, Charles sought to
win the most eminent men of the conquered race to himself by conferring
upon them the most important provincial posts, and in this way to render
possible the gradual reduction of the new people to an integral part of
the Empire. Then again, it is reported to us that he bestowed the
office of count on men who were not noble, even upon freedmen. In
fact, in the bestowal of offices, only the one principle prevailed, that
those were to be placed at the head of the district from whom the best
service for the good of the Empire might be expected.
The office was bestowed for life, but of course in case of disloyalty,
or even of bad government, it might be withdrawn without hesitation.
That Charles always reserved a free hand for himself is testified beyond
doubt, and therefore the allusions to the count's owing his office to the
grace of God are not so much emphasis of independence as a confession
of the humility due to God.
## p. 679 (#711) ############################################
The authority of the Count 679
The authority of the count himself was unusually extensive. It
embraced everything that concerned the State. The count is the king's
representative in his district. Just as the authority of the State mani-
fested itself primarily in military and judicial matters, so also did the
activities of the count. The count was the supreme administrator of
justice in his district. Usually he had to hold the general assemblies
of the gau, which, according to the regulations of Charles, brought
together all the freemen of the gau two or three times a year in what
were afterwards called the regular "Things. '" Difficult law cases, it
was specially enjoined by Charles the Great, the count was to determine
himself and not to leave to his subordinate officials. In the court of
the centenarius or subordinate judge, it runs in one law, no man may be
condemned to death, loss of freedom, or forfeiture of land or slaves—
that was reserved for the count or for the king's envoy. It was not
intended that this higher jurisdiction should be restricted to the three
great annual "Things," but only that the transfer of the most important
cases into the hands of the subordinate officials should be prevented1.
It was a principle of the constitution that the count was the ordinary
judge in the gau.
The organisation of the army was also in the hands of the count.
By him the levies were led or superintended, and he himself went on
campaign with the vassals of his district—one of his most important
functions. On him it further rested to summon to the royal service and
to exact state requirements from the freemen of the gau. He had to
represent in himself the special defensive authority of the king, just as
he had to see to the general peace. And just as the State in Carlo-
vingian times extended its power in different directions, the powers of
the count also, the representative of the State in the gau, seem unusually
extensive, particularly in the direction of matters of police.
In ecclesiastical affairs, also, the count is to help, as though assistant
to the bishop. Just as things secular and spiritual converged in Charles'
kingship, so willing co-operation was desired on the part of local bearers
of ecclesiastical and secular authority. The counts were directed to be
obedient to the bishops and to support them in all things. Rivalry
often disturbed the harmony, and Charles caused inquiry to be made
how an exact definition of the count's powers in spiritual matters and
of the bishop's in secular could be accomplished. But there was never
any doubt that bishops and counts were to be equally regarded as
important officials of the State. Louis the Pious caused the bishops
regularly to make reports concerning the counts, and the counts con-
cerning the bishops, so that he could exercise exact control. Naturally,
the count was furnished with the coercive powers indispensable to all
rulers. Such power under Charles the Great was so regulated that
1 Such is the view of Waitz, Verfassungsgesch. iv. pp. 381 ff. , to which for the
most part sufficient attention is not paid.
CH. XXI.
## p. 680 (#712) ############################################
680 The Marches
punishments were even fixed for disobedience to official orders, varying
according to the nature of the order, in such a way that the official was
allowed to determine a penalty independently of the object of the orders,
and graduated according to his personal authority1. According to the
Alemannic Law the count's " ban" amounted to six shillings, according
to the Saxon Capitulary of Charles the Great, for smaller transgressions
it was fifteen, and for more serious cases of disobedience sixty shillings.
Not till later, when the sixty shilling penalty was more generally used
and had become the punishment for disregard of a royal order, was the
official who was looked upon as essentially the king's official, the count,
regarded as holder of this king's ban.
Only a peculiar form of the system of government by counts, not an
abrogation of it, is seen in the organisation of the marches, which may
justly be looked on as the personal work of the great Emperor. That
the counties situated on the border of the Empire were provided with
arrangements for the defence and protection of the Empire is natural.
We must distinguish from these border counties the march district
proper, the newly conquered border land or else that specially arranged
for border defence, provided with numerous fortifications and forming
a bulwark before the counties of the Empire itself. So arose under
Charles himself, or at any rate at his instance, the Spanish, Breton,
Saxon or Danish, Sorbian, Avarian, and Friulian marks. Those at the
head of them were called graf, also margrave, markherzog, and by
similar titles. Sometimes border counties were in connexion with the
marches, and so arose a specially strong power, predominantly military,
which obtained for its owner the proud title of duke. Thus we can
understand when the Monk of St Gall, at the end of the ninth century,
relates how on the borders of the Empire Charles departed from the
rule that to one person only one county should be assigned.
If we see a thoroughgoing uniformity in the division into counties,
and only those districts were freed from it which had not been com-
pletely incorporated into the Empire, we cannot trace a similar
uniformity in the case of the subordinate officials. Here there were
great differences. And that is perfectly intelligible. In the first place,
if the Empire laid great weight on the carrying out of the county system
and sought to put aside everything that resisted the Frankish arrange-
ments, of course the old popular officials could no longer be left in the
lower places. Thus many differences are due to a continuation of
the old popular system or to a connexion of it with Frankish arrange-
ments. And moreover districts in private ownership became more and
more important, and the officials of the private owners more and more
assumed public functions, dispossessed the lower state officials and took
their place. Hence, in the dominions of Charles the Great we observe
1 Cf. Seeliger, Voiksrecht und KSnigsrecht, pp. 366 ff.
## p. 681 (#713) ############################################
Subordinate Officials 681
different officials acting in the subordinate positions side by side, and
the same official titles occur among those holding different official
positions.
The officials working under the counts are for the most part to be
divided into three classes: (1) Assistants and representatives of the
count not restricted to one part of his district. (2) Superintendents of
a subdivision of the county. (3) Different officials of private landowners,
local superintendents, or town officials for special, particularly military,
matters. In the first group the missi of the counts and the "viscounts"
can be reckoned, although a definite office of this kind can hardly be
assumed. We must rather suppose that a count frequently appointed
one of his subordinate officials, a centenarius and "vicar" to take his
place, but only temporarily, and that in such cases this subordinate
appeared as missus or "viscount. " To the second group belongs above
all the centenarius, the old Frankish official, who must be identified1 with
the "Thunginus" of the Salic "Volksrecht," the old national judge,
who was forced into dependence upon the king's officials, the counts, and
restricted to the administration of justice in minor matters, in order to
leave the higher entirely to the count. To the centenarius corresponds
the vicar. It is quite clear that under Charles the Great a division of
the counties into centenaries and vicariates was everywhere carried out,
at least in the middle and western counties of the Empire. To these
subdivisions of the West corresponded the Goe of Saxony, and to the
Frankish centenarii and vicars the Saxon Gogrqfen. To the third group
belong not only the superintendents of the royal domains called
Judices and other officials of these domains like the vUlici, who later
were found everywhere, but above all the tribunes (tribuni) and mayors
(scultheti), who are found in smaller districts as executive officials.
Tribuni and scultheti are, from the first, not names for a uniform
lower office but for different, though similar, subordinate officials—
there were scultheti of the king, the count, the private landowner, and
others.
But great as were the differences among the officials in the State,
and great as was the concession made to the peculiarities of the different
peoples and to different local needs, yet Charles knew how to retain in
his own hands perfect control over the whole. Indeed it was characteristic
of his government that all who had public duties to perform, or who had
to provide for the maintenance of Law and Order even in the smallest
districts, were controlled by the State and made responsible to the State.
The authority of the State did not draw back before private ownership.
It pressed forward everywhere. The counts supervised not only their
own subordinates but also the officials of ecclesiastical and secular lords.
1 That is the general older view which H. Brunner has tried to set aside, but in
my opinion unsuccessfully. He wishes to make a sharp distinction between the
Centenariu* and the Thunginut.
## p. 682 (#714) ############################################
682 The missi dominici
All belonged to the one great organism, to the universal State, in the
centre of which stood the monarch himself.
But how could the centre remain in living connexion with distant
parts and with the provincial officers? To solve this problem was the
task of the missi dominici, perhaps the most peculiar of all the Carlo-
vingian institutions.
The summit of the Carlovingian constitution was the organisation
of the office of the king's envoys, the missi dominici. These were not
intended to take the place of the dukes removed by the Carlovingians,
nor to be bearers of a provincial authority, but to bring the king's
will into the provinces, and to render possible an immediate connexion
of the people with the supreme government of the Empire. As in
all institutions, so here too Charles made a link with what had long
existed, while transforming it into something essentially new. The
Merovingians had already employed missi in different kinds of state
business, military, judicial, administrative, fiscal. But it was always
particular and special duty which the missus had to perform by the
king's commission. In the later Merovingian period this institution
fell into disuse, and it was not till the time of the Carlovingian mayors
of the palace that it was revived. From the time of Charles Martel
occurs the designation missi discurrentes. Whether that really signifies
that missi were sent out to travel over a definite district, to control
all officials and supplement their work, and whether the missi then
possessed full powers generally, cannot be decided. But it was certainly
so in the first years in the reign of Charles the Great, who made the
missi discurrentes, the travelling envoys, a regular institution of the
State. From 779 the missi appear with the quite general function
adjustitiasfaciendas, i. e. to preserve the right in every direction. They
acted with the counts, and eventually against them, for the adminis-
tration of justice; they watched the work of the judges, and themselves
held a court; they took steps for the improvement of ecclesiastical
affairs with or without the bishop, they inspected the monasteries,
and they superintended all officials.
Extensive as were the duties of these missi even at the beginning of
Charles' reign, and essential as was their work for the organisation of
the Empire, yet the whole institution only reached its full development
after Charles' coronation as emperor through edicts of the Diet held
at Aachen in the year 802'. Charles no longer wished, so report the
Annals of Lorsch, to send out as missi vassals who possessed no lands.
He appointed rather archbishops, bishops, and abbots, with dukes and
counts, in whose case bribery need not be feared.
On broad lines, their duties were characterised generally in a
capitulary of 802, the particulars being appended in a long list. The
1 The result of the investigations of Waitz (cf. m. p. 451) remains unshaken,
even after the further work of Krause.
## p. 683 (#715) ############################################
The missi dominici 683
whole institution, which had long established itself, now appears raised
and made permanent. The Empire was divided into large fixed districts
(missatica, legatUmes), perhaps partly already in such a way as is testified
for the time of Louis the Pious, or perhaps the missatka then corre-
sponded to the metropolitan provinces.
Every year these envoys were sent out, generally two or three
together, under Charles frequently an ecclesiastic and a layman. They
received instructions, directions arranged in sections respecting their
official duties, in which too were included general orders to be com-
municated to the officials and people of the Missaticum (capitvla
missorum). They had to give a report of their work, as a rule
probably at a meeting of the Empire, to make inquiries in case of
doubt and to obtain new decisions from the monarch or the meeting.
The missus was to enter into communication both with the officials and
also with the people themselves, for to afford assistance against oppres-
sion and violence even of the officials was the most important duty of
the royal envoys. For this reason they were required to hold general
meetings. According to a decree of Louis the Pious, this general meeting
was to take place in the middle of May, but of course in case of need it
could be divided into several meetings to be held in different places.
Here the bishops, abbots, counts, royal stewards, and representatives
of the abbesses had to appear, and every count had to bring with him
his vicars, centenars, and three or four of the judges. At these provincial
assemblies the envoy sought to obtain disclosures of the affairs of his
province through the statements of those dwelling in the gaus, who
were bound to truth by oath, and of witnesses of crimes. Abuses were
removed, bad officials brought to account or even summoned before the
king. That this arrangement already existed under Charles may be
taken as proved. In addition to these assemblies, the envoys also held
special courts of justice in the different judicial divisions of their
provinces. They were, however, not to injure but merely to control
and supplement the judicial work of the regular judges, especially the
counts. Hence their judicial duties were limited to four months,
January, April, July, October, while the remaining months were
reserved for the courts of the counts.
In each of these four months,
Charles ordered courts to be held at different places with the count
of the district. At other times the envoys travelled about, inspected
churches and monasteries, and everywhere saw that things were in order.
Together with the regular envoys, extraordinary envoys were still used
as of old on special missions, whether military, judicial, or ecclesiastical.
But no great significance was ever attached to them. The importance
of the whole institution rests purely on the regular envoys.
The purpose of the centralisation finds expression in this endeavour
to preserve the unity of the whole while justifiable local differences
were recognised. Unity was to be in the kingdom. Because the
## p. 684 (#716) ############################################
684 The Empire
king could not appear everywhere in person, his place was taken by
men who were to be regarded as his representatives. Herein lies the
essential character of the whole institution—arrangements were made
which enabled the king to appear personally active in all parts of the
Empire. The fundamental idea of the purely personal and immediate
government of the monarch is thus realised. In this peculiarity lay
the strength, but at the same time also the weakness, of the institu-
tion itself. Its strength shewed itself in the fact that thereby an immense
influence of the king was made possible, and all things were quickened
from the centre. Its weakness was seen in the excessive dependence
for strength on the personality of the monarch, and in the failure of
continuous and immediate influence of the royal authority from the
moment the central power failed. The institution had no strength of
its own, it was absolutely dependent on the circumstances of the court.
And when the influence from the centre, which under Charles had been
so vigorous and powerful, ceased in the later years of Louis the Pious,
the institution of the royal envoys became degenerate. It either ceased
entirely or it became territorial and thereby was robbed of its proper
and original living principle.
Nothing manifests so clearly the whole inner development of the
unified Carlovingian State as the history of the royal envoys. Nothing
reveals more surely the peculiar nature of the State than this one
institution.
The universal empire of the great Charles could not long outlive its
founder. General forces certainly were in existence which assisted the
unification, such as the thought of universal unity which proceeded
from the ecclesiastical conception and from the Roman Empire. It is
true that the genius of Charles made these ideas of unity serviceable to
his efforts for power. But he failed to equalise the diverging intel-
lectual and material needs of the different peoples subjected to his
rule. And he failed to erect a bureaucracy strong in itself and not
absolutely dependent upon the changeable circumstances of the court.
A bureaucracy certainly was erected; but a bureaucracy of a peculiar
kind, a patriarchal bureaucracy. Such a one has no independent strength
of its own, it shares for the most part the fate of the ruling family, and
is chiefly supported by the ability of the monarch. If this fails, then
the State itself fails. To create anything enduring of this kind was
beyond the power even of Charles the Great.
It was not the advance of the feudal system that brought about the
early collapse of the Carlovingian Empire. The feudal system only
furnished the outer form and the external support for the decomposing
tendencies. These had their root in the nature of the social development
of the Western peoples themselves, in general factors of their civilisation
both material and mental, and also in the personal character of the
leaders of the State.
## p. 685 (#717) ############################################
685
CHAPTER XXII.
THE PAPACY, TO CHARLES THE GREAT.
The growth of the papal power can be regarded from two standpoints
according as we interpret the expression in an earthly or a spiritual
sense. Are we to regard the popes as rulers over large domains and at
times the most powerful of Italian princes; or are we to look on them
as the heads of Western Christendom, the supreme arbiters of religion
and morals from Iceland to Sicily, from the Atlantic to the eastern out-
skirts of Germany and Hungary? At the beginning of the seventh
century they were neither, and by the end of the eleventh they were
both. Till 1859 their secular dominion remained unimpaired in extent,
and since 1517 they have ceased to exercise undisputed moral authority
in Western Christendom. In 1870 the last vestige of their temporal
power was wrested from their grasp, yet in the same year they made
claims to a spiritual authority which would not have been conceded to
them by the Church even when their influence was paramount. Closely
interwoven therefore as are the temporal and spiritual powers of the
Papacy, they are not identical; and however difficult it may be to
separate one from the other, they must be distinguished. Yet in the
present case it is necessary to deal with the subject from both aspects,
paying special attention to the question of the process of the liberation
of the Papacy from influences which might subsequently have controlled
or fettered its development.
Gregory the Great is said to have originated the medieval Papacy;
and this is in part true, though it took nearly three centuries after his
work was done to produce the first of the medieval popes. Nicolas I
inaugurated the line of priest-kings of Western Christendom in a truer
sense than Gregory I. It is true that the earlier pontiff' was far the
greater man; but the office he filled was less in the eyes of his con-
temporaries; and he was obliged to address kings and princes in a more
submissive tone than that employed by Nicolas in the ninth century.
Gregory was, in fact, a great subject, possessed of vast estates and
considerable wealth, able to exercise a powerful influence on the politics
of his age, to arrange treaties and to delimit frontiers. But, though a
great noble, he was not a sovereign prince, his lands were estates, not
Oil. XXII.
## p. 686 (#718) ############################################
686 Progress of the Lombards
dominions; he spoke to emperors and kings not as their equal but as a
subordinate; he even judged them from the standpoint of an inferior.
Nicolas I on the other hand was lord paramount in his own dominion,
and addressed the princes of Western Europe with the authority of a
ruler on earth, vested with spiritual powers which rendered him infinitely
their superior. The task before us is to trace how this came about,
shewing the successive stages by which the Roman pontiffs asserted their
independence of all secular authority. It is this which differentiates the
Papacy from every other Christian bishopric, making it both a temporal
and a spiritual power, and the accomplishment of this took place between
a. d. 604 and 868, though this chapter concludes with the year 800.
The immediate successors of Gregory the Great do not appear to
have given much promise of the future eminence of the throne they
occupied. The popes of the seventh century succeeded one another
with suspicious rapidity, few occupying the See of Rome for more than
a few years. Appointed by permission of the Emperor or his repre-
sentative in Italy, the exarch of Ravenna, the pontiffs submitted themselves
to the secular power, and felt its heavy hand whenever they presumed to
resist the imperial commands even in matters spiritual; nor was it till
the eighth century, when the Lombards were extruding the Greeks, as
the imperialists of Constantinople had already begun to be called, from
the shores of Italy, that a series of greater popes, more fortunate than
their predecessors in the duration of their pontificates, were able to assert
and maintain their authority. Then it was that the Lombards, who
had captured Ravenna, and extended their influence to the South of
Italy and were preparing to occupy the ducatus Romae, found themselves
confronted by the Roman pontiffs claiming to represent the majesty of
the Empire and to seize those prerogatives which, as they maintained,
had only been wrested from the hands of the Greeks in order to revert
to Rome and its chief priest.
Thus began those extraordinary negotiations between the popes and
the Frankish rulers, who with the sanction of St Peter were transformed
first into native kings and finally into emperors and legitimate lords of
the Roman world. In gratitude for these services the kings of the
Franks and emperors of the Romans made over to the See of Rome
certain parts of northern and central Italy which had belonged to the
Empire in the seventh century.
At the same time, whilst the popes were consolidating their authority
over Christendom and their dominion in Italy by diplomacy, their power
was being strengthened by the assertion of legal claims to all privileges
which the reverence of princes was bestowing upon them. Appeals to
the antiquity rather of the imagination than of history attempted to
shew that the claims of the Roman See were based on immemorial rights
or on the acts of emperors whose names, already half legendary in the
West, were bound up with the vanished glories of imperial days. The
/
## p. 687 (#719) ############################################
Ideals of the Age 687
false decretals and the donation of Constantine were demonstrating that
nothing which the popes could receive or demand was beyond their
rights, and casting a false glamour of legality over any claims they
might choose to make.
In dealing with the strange and wonderful history before us it is
remarkable that we meet with comparatively few noteworthy characters
or dramatic incidents if we except Charles the Great and his coronation
at Rome. Hardly any literature worthy of the name illumines our
path, and the verses which have come down to us are sufficient to shew
that poetry was a lost art. The revival of civilisation and government
under Charles is only remarkable because of the darkness which preceded
and followed it, and the two striking features of the age, the rise of
Islam and the revival of the Roman Empire in the East after a series of
unparalleled disasters, do not come into our purview of events. Despite
all this the squalor which surrounds the period is brightened by the
presence of great ideals, which men kept in their minds and before their
eyes, though they were unable to give them form or substance. The
remedy for the anarchy of Western Europe was sought in the ideal
which the Roman Empire had left, a unity of government for the human
race; and men's eyes were turned to Christian Rome to provide what
was so sorely needed. The faith in Jesus Christ went far beyond the
Roman law in recognising the unity of mankind; and from it, as
embodied in the Roman Church, the inheritor of the city which had
been mistress of the world, the Frankish monarchs hoped that a Christian
Empire would arise to federate humanity. For centuries successive
generations persevered in carrying out this idea; and who can deny that
it was a grand and noble one? The rise of the papal power is one of
the most important events in modern history because it was inspired by
the motive which dominated the best thinkers of the Middle Ages and
raised their impotent efforts above the sordid policy of our own day.
Even the completeness of their failure does not rob them of the glory of
having seen great visions and dreamed splendid dreams.
The rise of the papal power was due alike to the necessity of
political independence and to the circumstances which freed the popes
from the domination of the emperors in Constantinople and the Lombard
conquerors of Italy, and enabled them to secure the assistance of the
Franks from beyond the Alps: it was due still more to the disintegration
of the Empire of Charles the Great under his unfortunate successors. It
will perhaps be of assistance to us if each of these be taken separately.
We will therefore discuss (1) the Papacy and the Eastern emperors,
(2) the Lombards, (3) the Franks, and the new Western Empire.
(1) Since the outbreak of the Arian dispute the eastern provinces
had never known the meaning of religious peace, though the way in
which that controversy had ended might have encouraged hopes that
similar differences were not incapable of adjustment. Despite the
/'
## p. 688 (#720) ############################################
688 Rome and Church Doctrine [481-52S
attempt of Constantius to coerce his subjects to unity in his struggle
with Athanasius and despite the feebler efforts of Valens, the question was
allowed much freedom of debate; and the creed of Nicaea, as explained
by the wisdom of the Cappadocian fathers, was ultimately accepted bv
all. But the unfortunate dispute concerning the Two Natures of our
Lord, partly owing to the unscrupulous character of those who engaged in
it, and partly to the mutual jealousies of the great patriarchates of the
East, produced schisms which seriously threatened the peace of the
Empire, and ultimately lost it some of its most important provinces.
In this great dispute Rome twice intervened, first in favour of Cyril in
condemnation of Nestorius, and later in opposition to Dioscorus against
Eutyches. On the latter occasion the pope, Leo the Great, put forward
his famous Tome, which the Western Church considered to be a fitting
end to the whole controversy. Not so thought many of the Oriental
Churches; especially those of Egypt and Syria, by whom the proceedings
of the Council of Chalcedon were regarded as an insult to Cyril, the
revered head of the Alexandrian Church. In Constantinople, a city
which gained an evil name for the formidable character of its riots and
seditions, parties were evenly divided between the upholders and opponents
of the Council of Chalcedon, between whom the reigning Emperor
endeavoured often in vain to hold the balance, generally at the cost of
being denounced as a heretic and traitor to the Faith.
Policy seemed to require that the Church should come to some such
agreement as was arrived at in the Arian controversy, during which the
work of the Council of Nicaea, without being repudiated, was some-
what modified and explained. In like manner it was hoped that the
ambiguities of the Council of Chalcedon would be removed by the
conciliatory action of the ecclesiastical authority backed by that of
the Emperor. In the Christian East matters of religion and doctrine
had always been considered to lie within the sphere of the imperial
prerogative, and the Emperor regarded himself as even more than the
clergy responsible for the maintenance of the purity of the faith. But
to the Western ecclesiastics the faith as defined by Leo was not to be
explained but accepted with unquestioning obedience, and any attempt
to reopen the question was an insult to his memory and to the Roman
See. Accordingly, when at the instigation of Acacius of Constantinople,
Zeno sanctioned (481) the Henoticon, or scheme of union with the
I Monophysites, the Roman Church broke off all intercourse with that of
Constantinople. Fortunately for the prestige of the popes, Italy was
under the government first of Odovacar and afterwards of Theodoric,
both of whom were barbarians professing Arianism, and no intervention
from Constantinople was possible. Till a. d. 519 the Old and the New
Rome remained in a condition of religious separation, and union was
only brought about by the submission of the Church of the new capital.
With the accession of Justinian (527) and the subjugation of Italy
## p. 689 (#721) ############################################
535-610] Emperors dictate to the Church 689
by the Byzantines (535-553) the Papacy entered upon a series of
humiliations which no barbarian ruler had even dreamed of inflicting
upon it. The loyalty and submission displayed by the popes is a proof
of the awe in which they held the majesty of the Empire.
The attitude of Justinian towards the Roman Church was frankly
autocratic: he expected and exacted obedience. For the early part of
his reign he favoured the orthodox, whilst his wife, the powerful
Empress Theodora, inclined to the Monophysite party. But at her
death Justinian inclined to a compromise suggested to him by Theodore
Askidas, bishop of Caesarea. Briefly, this was to condemn the writings
of three divines specially obnoxious to the Monophysites, whilst other-
wise maintaining the dignity of the Fourth General Council. Justinian
has been reproached for devoting his time to the study of theology
instead of attending to the politics of his empire; but in truth, its
tranquillity mainly depended on the theological question, and the Emperor
hoped that in condemning Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret's writings
against Cyril, and the letter of Ibas to Maris the Persian he would
render the settlement at Chalcedon acceptable to his Egyptian and
other Monophysite subjects. Such was the political aim of the otherwise
uninteresting controversy of the "Three Chapters. " That the Roman
See would oppose the imperial policy was inevitable, especially as the
three writers condemned had been acquitted at Chalcedon, and to doubt
the justice of the acts of this council was disloyalty to the memory of
Pope Leo. But Justinian was not accustomed to allow his will to be
disputed. Pope Vigilius was hurried from Rome to Constantinople and
forced to assent to the condemnation of the Chapters at the Fifth General
Council (553). Never had a pope, at any rate since the days of Liberius,
endured such a humiliation. So fully was this realised in the West that
the churches of Illyricum and Istria made the weakness of Vigilius,
hampered as he was by the promises exacted by the Empress Theodora as
the price of his consecration, the pretext of a schism which lasted for a
generation or more.
The disasters which overtook the Eastern Empire in the seventh
century might well excuse any attempt to procure ecclesiastical unity.
More and more the divisions of the Church were becoming tokens of
national rather than religious sympathy. The Monophysite in Egypt
believed in One nature in Christ, not because he was a theologian but
because he was the natural enemy of the Melchite or Greek Christians
who declared that Christ was " in Two Natures. " The century had opened
with the remarkable successes of the Persians, who seemed to have
wrested from the Romans the domination of the East and to have
restored their Empire to the extent it had reached in the days of
Cambyses. The overthrow of the despicable Phocas (610), however,
made way for a monarch who, had he died a few years earlier than he
did, would have been comparable to Alexander the Great. Heraclius
C. MED. II. VOL. II. CH. XXII. 44
## p. 690 (#722) ############################################
690 Monotheletism and the Papacy [c. 630-715
rolled back the tide of conquest, restored the frontiers of the Empire,
recovered the Holy Cross, and humiliated Persia. Is it to be wondered at,
therefore, that the victorious Emperor should have made another attempt
to reunite the Christians, and have listened to those who suggested that,
if it could be acknowledged that in our Lord were two natures—the
human and the divine—and but one working energy (ivepyeia Bpaa-riKij),
Monophysites would unite with the supporters of Chalcedon? To this
Honorius (pope 625-638) was disposed to assent, and in his correspondence
he used the term " one will" (una voluntas) as applying to the Saviour.
Hence the controversy is known as the Monothelete. But the action of
Honorius was profoundly unpopular in Rome; and the successes of the
Muslims and the loss of Egypt and Syria were regarded as a just punish-
ment of the heresy of Heraclius as expressed in his Ekthesis.
The Monothelete controversy was fraught with humiliation for the
See of Rome. Constans II (641-668), the brutal grandson of Heraclius,
issued his Type in favour of Monothelete views; and, because he was
opposed by Pope Martin V, he ordered the exarch Theodore Calliopas
to seize the recalcitrant pontiff and bring him to Constantinople. There
the Roman bishop, after enduring insult and imprisonment, which were
unable to break his spirit, was deposed and banished by imperial decree
to the Crimea, where he died deserted by his friends, a martyr for the
faith as defined by his great predecessor Leo. During the reign of
Constantine Pogonatus, in the pontificate of Agatho (678-682), the
Roman See obtained some reparation for the insults heaped on Martin.
At the Sixth General Council, which met in Constantinople 7 Nov. 680,
the Monothelete doctrine was condemned, and with it its supporters,
Cyrus, bishop of Alexandria, and two patriarchs of Constantinople,
Sergius and Pyrrhus. In addition to these, a unique circumstance in
ecclesiastical history, the General Council pronounced Pope Honorius to
be anathema non quidem ut haereticus sed ut haereticorum fautor. Thus
the Roman See had to accept the deep humiliation of having one of its
occupants pronounced unsound in a matter of faith.
A further insult was still in store for the Papacy. In 692 another
council was summoned to Constantinople for the purpose of completing
the work of the Sixth Council by drawing up canons of discipline. This
Synod, generally known as the Council in Trullo, passed its canons and
sent them for ratification to Pope Sergius, and on his refusal to
acknowledge the work of the Council the Protospatharius was sent to
arrest him and he was threatened with the fate of St Martin. The
Romans however stood by their bishop and rescued him from the
imperial officer.
The last pope to be summoned to Constantinople was Constantine
(708-715), who came at the invitation of Justinian II (Rhinotmetus).
He was, however, treated with honour by that formidable emperor and
returned in safety in 711 to Rome.
## p. 691 (#723) ############################################
715-731] Iconoclasm 691
We have now reached the period of the last struggle between
Constantinople and Rome, due, like the Three Chapters in the days of
Justinian I and the Monothelete controversy in the following century,
to another amazing display of the strength inherent in the Empire. In
the famous "Isaurian11 dynasty the Graeco-Roman power, which had
been threatened at its very source by the triumphant Caliphs, once more
shewed itself the strongest force in the world. Again orthodoxy made
overtures of peace to Monophysitism, but in a very different form from
those of the sixth and seventh centuries. The schismatic or heretical
churches, whether Nestorian or Monophysite, shewed a conservatism
greater than that exhibited by the Catholics in maintaining a simplicity
in church ornamentation which orthodoxy had long abandoned. The
images or pictures, originally introduced, to use the words of John of
Damascus, as "books for the unlearned,11 had not found a place in the
Monophysite or Nestorian churches; but among the orthodox had
become objects of superstitious reverence. To remove this scandal
and to save the Church from the reproach of Jews and Muslims as
well as to conciliate the Christians outside its pale, Leo the Isaurian in
726 issued his celebrated edict against the images and inaugurated the
Iconoclastic controversy. Since the Monophysites opposed the attempt
to represent the human appearance of our Lord as contrary to their
doctrine of the loss of his manhood in the infinity of his Godhead, the
edict was sure to find favour in their eyes1.
It is not easy to determine the precise effect of the Iconoclastic decree
on the Roman Church. Certainly Leo the Isaurian1s reign saw the
beginning of the complete abandonment of the exarchate of Ravenna
and its dependencies by the Greeks. Letters survive, professedly by
Pope Gregory II (715-731) to Leo, denouncing him with the utmost
violence and defending the image-worship with as grotesque an ignorance
of the Old Testament as of the rules of common courtesy. It is now
generally supposed, however, that these two letters are spurious, alien as
they are to what we know of the wise and prudent man which Gregory II
shewed himself in his other dealings. Nor does there seem to have been
any formal breach between the Papacy and Constantinople. Down to
the end of the eighth century the popes acknowledged the Emperor.
But the chain was really broken. The Lombards took Ravenna,
occupied the Pentapolis and began to threaten the ducatus Romae,
already a virtually independent state with an army commanded by its
Duke, and with the Pope almost acknowledged as the representative of
the Emperor. When Ravenna was taken is unknown: the whole history
of the period is obscure; all that can be said with certainty is that by
1 The origin of the Iconoclastic controversy will be related elsewhere. It may
have been partly due to the antagonism between the Asiatic (from which the army
was mainly recruited) and the Hellenic elements of the Empire. So Brehier, La
Querelle des Images (Paris, 1904).
ch. xxii. 44—2
## p. 692 (#724) ############################################
692 Precarious position of the Papacy [c. 739-754
7 July 751 the exarchate had come to an end and the Greeks were no
longer a power in Italy. The Pope had also lost his Sicilian estates
which afforded his principal revenue. The experience the Papacy had
gained by its connexion with Constantinople was not forgotten, and
moulded its subsequent policy. It became evident that to work out its
destiny it needed alike freedom and protection—freedom to assert its
claims to rule over the conscience of mankind, and protection from the
enemies who encompassed the defenceless city.
Neither of these could the Byzantine government afford. The
Lombards were pressing closer on Rome, and no prospect of aid from
the Emperor was at hand; and in any case it would be too great a
price to yield to his demands in matters theological. The aims of the
Empire and the East were distinct from those of Rome and the West.
In the latter there was practically no great religious difference, and the
priests, secure in their monopoly of learning, were unlikely to disturb
men's minds by explaining the traditional faith or adapting it to the
conditions of the hour. In the more educated East questions of the
utmost moment caused serious divisions among clergy and laity alike;
nor is it without significance that Pope Agatho had to explain to the
Sixth General Council that his delegates were rude and unlettered men
who had to live by the labour of their hands. So far then were the
rough and ignorant clergy even of Rome removed from their brethren of
the East. But, though ignorant of the arts of life, the Roman clergy
haul one distinct advantage over the more cultured ecclesiastics of Con-
stantinople. They had fought a long and stubborn battle with the
barbarian invaders of Italy with no one to come to their aid, and in the
struggle they had developed political instincts denied to the servants of
a political and spiritual despotism. Thus the popes of the eighth century
learned the statecraft with which their successors were to raise the papal
power to its highest pitch. From the birth of Christ there is approxi-
mately as long an interval backwards to Romulus as forwards to the
political severance of Rome from the Empire, and at the latter period
the foundations of a world-governing power were as surely laid as when
the first king built the walls of Rome.
(2) The Lombard invaders of Italy after a long struggle had
succeeded in dispossessing the Empire of all pretence to exercise
sovereignty in Italy. They had made their appearance in the year 568
under Alboin, and though Paul the Deacon testifies to the comparative
mildness of their rule at first, on the death of Alboin it became
intolerable. Two facts are worth bearing in mind, namely that the
Lombards are the first invaders of Italy who settled with no sort of
imperial sanction—Alaric, Odovacar and Theodoric having all had
recognition from the Roman government; and further that under their
occupation the theory of a united Italy was abandoned, never to be
realised till the nineteenth century. There was further a sort of
## p. 693 (#725) ############################################
673-675] Lombard and Roman territory 693
undeveloped feudalism in the Lombard settlement by which the
kingdom was divided into more or less independent dukedoms, some—
like those of Spoleto and Benevento—eventually detaching themselves
completely from the king's authority. After the death of Alboin in 578
there were no less than thirty-six dukes each exercising unrestrained the
power of a petty tyrant. But anarchical as was the condition of affairs
among the Lombards at the close of the sixth century, it was becoming
evident that the Byzantine government was powerless to expel them
from Italy and even that its abandonment of the peninsula was only a
matter of time.
The condition of Byzantine Italy was not altogether dissimilar from
that of the Lombard territory. As at Pavia, the capital of the king, so
at the exarch's seat at Ravenna, the central authority was at times
deplorably weak; and in both cases the "dukes" were practically
independent princes. The duke of Naples for example was as little
amenable to the exarch as the Lombard dukes of Benevento were to
their sovereign. The difficulty was principally one of communication.
The Lombards held the country and the Byzantines the coast, and
unless the road between Rome and Ravenna could be kept open it
was impossible for the exarch to govern, succour, or advise the Pope;
and in one case a pope's enthronement had to be deferred for more than
a year owing to the difficulty in obtaining confirmation of his election.
Hence it was of the utmost importance to keep open the Flaminian
way leading from Rome to Ravenna and the coast, and the possession
of such places as Perugia was vital to the Romans.
The territory occupied in Italy by the Lombards and the exarchate
in Italy respectively, say during the pontificate of Gregory I (590-604),
was approximately as follows. The Byzantines on the east coast held
Istria on the Adriatic, the islands along the coast already known as
Venetia, the marshes around Comacchio and Ferrara, the mouth of
the Po where Ravenna is situated, and inland as far as Bologna.
Practically from Venetia to Ancona the frontiers of the Empire were the
Apennines and the sea. Then came a very debatable territory giving
access by way of Perugia to the Roman duchy. Proceeding south-
ward, Calabria remained imperial till 675, when Brindisi and Tarento
fell into the hands of Romuald, duke of Benevento, and Bruttium
and Sicily were held by the Greeks. On the western coast were two
duchies, Naples and Rome. The Roman duchy was constantly shrinking
owing to the encroachments of the Lombard dukes of Benevento and
Spoleto, the latter having pushed his frontier almost to the N. E. wall
of the city, his boundary being the old Sabine one formed by the Tiber
and the Anio. The rest of Italy was held by the Lombards, the
valley of the Po being more directly under the authority of the king,
whose capital was Pavia, whilst the three great almost independent
duchies were Friuli (Forum Julii), north of Venetia, Spoleto, extending
## p. 694 (#726) ############################################
694 The Conflict unavoidable [593-741
from the Pentapolis to the Roman duchy, and Benevento in the south.
