of the Lombard kingdom by Charles king of the Franks.
A.D. 774.
So long indeed as the Franks were separated by a hostile kingdom from their new allies, this control remained little better than nominal. But when on Pipin's death the restless Lombards again took up arms and menaced the possessions of the Church, Pipin's son Charles or Charlemagne swept down like a whirlwind from the Alps at the call of Pope Hadrian, seized king Desiderius in his capital, assumed himself the Lombard crown, and made northern Italy thenceforward an integral part of the Frankish empire. Proceeding to Rome at the head of his victorious army, the first of a long line of Teutonic kings who were to find her love more deadly than her hate, he was received by Hadrian with distinguished honours, and welcomed by the people as their leader and deliverer. Yet even then, whether out of policy or from that sentiment of reverence to which his ambitious mind did not refuse to bow, he was moderate in claims of jurisdiction, he yielded to the pontiff the place of honour in processions, and renewed, although in the guise of a lord and conqueror, the gift of the Exarchate and Pentapolis, which Pipin had made to the Roman Church twenty years before.
Charles and Hadrian.
It is with a strange sense, half of sadness, half of amusement, that in watching the progress of this grand historical drama, we recognise the meaner motives by which its chief actors were influenced. The Frankish king and the Roman pontiff were for the time the two most powerful forces that urged the movement of the world, leading it on by swift steps to a mighty crisis of its fate, themselves guided, as it might well seem, by the purest zeal for its spiritual welfare. Their words and acts, their whole character and bearing in the sight of expectant Christendom, were worthy of men destined to leave an indelible impress on their own and many succeeding ages. Nevertheless in them too appears the undercurrent of vulgar human desires and passions. The lofty and fervent mind of Charles was not free from the stirrings of personal ambition: yet these may be excused, if not defended, as almost inseparable from an intense and restless genius, which, be it never so unselfish in its ends, must in pursuing them fix upon everything its grasp and raise out of everything its monument. The policy of the Popes was prompted by motives less noble. Ever since the extinction of the Western Empire had emancipated the ecclesiastical potentate from secular control, the first and most abiding object of his schemes and prayers had been the acquisition of territorial wealth in the neighbourhood of his capital. He had indeed a sort of justification – for Rome, a city with neither trade nor industry, was crowded with poor, for whom it devolved on the bishop to provide. Yet the pursuit was one which could not fail to pervert the purposes of the Popes and give a sinister character to all they did. It was this fear for the lands of the Church far more than for religion or the safety of the city – neither of which were really endangered by the Lombard attacks – that had prompted their passionate appeals to Charles Martel and Pipin; it was now the well-grounded hope of having these possessions confirmed and extended by Pipin's greater son that made the Roman ecclesiastics so forward in his cause. And it was the same lust after worldly wealth and pomp, mingled with the dawning prospect of an independent principality, that now began to seduce them into a long course of guile and intrigue. For this is probably the very time, although the exact date cannot be established, to which must be assigned the extraordinary forgery of the Donation of Constantine, whereby it was pretended that power over Italy and the whole West had been granted by the first Christian Emperor to Pope Sylvester and his successors in the Chair of the Apostle.
Accession of Pope Leo III, A.D. 796.
For the next twenty-four years Italy remained quiet. The government of Rome was carried on in the name of the Patrician Charles, although it does not appear that he sent thither any official representative; while at the same time both the city and the exarchate continued to admit the nominal supremacy of the Eastern Emperor, employing the years of his reign to date documents. In A.D. 796, Leo the Third succeeded Pope Hadrian, and signalized his devotion to the Frankish throne by sending to Charles the banner of the city and the keys of the holiest of all Rome's shrines, the confession of St. Peter, asking that some officer should be deputed to the city to receive from the people their oath of allegiance to the Patrician. He had soon need to seek the Patrician's help for himself. In A.D. 798 a sedition broke out: the Pope, going in solemn procession from the Lateran to the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, was attacked by a band of armed men, headed by two officials of his court, nephews of his predecessor; was wounded and left for dead, and with difficulty succeeded in escaping to Spoleto, whence he fled northward into the Frankish lands. Charles had led his army against the revolted Saxons: thither Leo following overtook him at Paderborn in Westphalia. The king received with respect his spiritual father, entertained and conferred with him for some time, and at length sent him back to Rome under the escort of Angilbert, one of his trustiest ministers; promising to follow ere long in person. After some months peace was restored in Saxony, and in the autumn of 799 Charles descended from the Alps once more, while Leo revolved deeply the great scheme for whose accomplishment the time was now ripe.
Belief in the Roman Empire not extinct.
Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since the last Cæsar of the West resigned his power into the hands of the senate, and left to his Eastern brother the sole headship of the Roman world. To the latter Italy had from that time been nominally subject; but it was only during one brief interval between the death of Totila the last Ostrogothic king and the descent of Alboin the first Lombard, that his power had been really effective. In the further provinces, Gaul, Spain, Britain, it was only a memory. But the idea of a Roman Empire as a necessary part of the world's order had not vanished: it had been admitted by those who seemed to be destroying it; it had been cherished by the Church; was still recalled by laws and customs; was dear to the subject populations, who fondly looked back to the days when slavery was at least mitigated by peace and order. We have seen the Teuton endeavouring everywhere to identify himself with the system he overthrew. As Goths, Burgundians, and Franks sought the title of consul or patrician, as the Lombard kings when they renounced their Arianism styled themselves Flavii, so even in distant England the fierce Saxon and Anglian conquerors used the names of Roman dignities, and before long began to call themselves imperatores and basileis of Britain. Within the last century and a half the rise of Mohammedanism45 had brought out the common Christianity of Europe into a fuller relief. The false prophet had left one religion, one Empire, one Commander of the faithful: the Christian commonwealth needed more than ever an efficient head and centre. Such leadership it could nowise find in the Court of the Bosphorus, growing ever feebler and more alien to the West. The name of 'respublica,' permanent at the elder Rome, had never been applied to the Eastern Empire. Its government was from the first half Greek, half Asiatic; and had now drifted away from its ancient traditions into the forms of an Oriental despotism. Claudian had already sneered at 'Greek Quirites46 :' the general use, since Heraclius's reign, of the Greek tongue, and the difference of manners and usages, made the taunt now more deserved.
Motives of the Pope.
The Pope had no reason to wish well to the Byzantine princes, who while insulting his weakness had given him no help against the savage Lombards, and who for nearly seventy years47 had been contaminated by a heresy the more odious that it touched not speculative points of doctrine but the most familiar usages of worship. In North Italy their power was extinct: no pontiff since Zacharias had asked their confirmation of his election: nay, the appointment of the intruding Frank to the patriciate, an office which it belonged to the Emperor to confer, was of itself an act of rebellion. Nevertheless their rights subsisted: they were still, and while they retained the imperial name, must so long continue, titular sovereigns of the Roman city. Nor could the spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal: without the Roman Empire there could not be a Roman, nor by necessary consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church48. For, as will be shewn more fully hereafter, men could not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought: Christianity must
After the
Several Emperors during this period had been patrons of images, as was Irene at the moment of which I write: the stain nevertheless adhered to their government as a whole.
I should not have thought it necessary to explain that the sentence in the text is meant simply to state what were (so far as can be made out) the sentiments and notions of the ninth century, if a writer in the
To a modern eye there is of course no necessary connection between the Roman Empire and a catholic and apostolic Church; in fact, the two things seem rather, such has been the impression made on us by the long struggle of church and state, in their nature mutually antagonistic. The interest of history lies not least in this, that it shews us how men have at different times entertained wholly different notions respecting the relation to one another of the same ideas or the same institutions.
