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Bible Encyclopedias
France History
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or HISTORY
The identity of the earliest inhabitants of Gaul is veiled in obscurity, though philologists, anthropologists and archaeologists are using the glimmer of traditions collected by ancient historians to shed a faint twilight upon that remote C past. The subjugation of those primitive tribes did not mean their annihilation: their blood still flows in the veins of Frenchmen; and they survive also on those megalithic monuments (see STONE MONUMENTS) with which the soil of France is dotted, in the drawings and sculptures of caves hollowed out along the sides of the valleys, and in the arms and ornaments yielded by sepulchral tumuli, while the names of the rivers and mountains of France probably perpetuate the first utterances of those nameless generations.
The first peoples of whom we have actual knowledge are the Iberians and Ligurians. The Basques who now inhabit both sides of the Pyrenean range are probably the last representatives of the Iberians, who came from Spain to settle between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay. The Ligurians, who exhibited the hard cunning characteristic of the Genoese Riviera, must have been descendants of that Indo-European vanguard who occupied all northern Italy and the centre and south-east of France, who in the 7th century B.C. received the Phocaean immigrants at Marseilles, and who at a much later period were encountered by Hannibal during his Ligiwians. march to Rome, on the banks of the Rhne, the frontier of the Iberian and Ligurian territories. Upon thes~ peoples it was that the conquering minority of Celts or Gauls imposed themselves, to be succeeded at a later date by the Roman aristocracy.
When Gaul first enters the field of history, Rome has already laid the foundation of her freedom, Athens dazzles the eastern Mediterranean with her literature and her art, while B t in the west Carthage and Marseilles are lining opposite t,~CZs~ shores with their great houses of commerce. Coming from the valley of the Danube in the 6th century, the Celts or Gauls had little by little occupied central and southern Europe long before they penetrated into the plains of the Sane, the Seine, and the Loire as far as the Spanish border, driving out the former inhabitants of the country. A century later their pciitical hegemony, extending from the Black Sea to the Strait of Gibraltar, began to disintegrate, and the Gauls then embarked on more distant migrations, from the Columns of Hercules to the plateaux of Asia Minor, taking Rome on their way. Their empire in Gaul, encroached upon in the north by the Belgae, a kindred race, and in the south by the Iberians, gradually contracted in area and eventually crumbled to pieces. This process served the turn of the Romans, who little by little had subjugated first the Cisalpine Gauls and afterwards those inhabiting the south-east of France, which was turned into a Roman province in the 2nd century. Up to The this time Hellenism and the mercantile spirit of the ~ Jews had almost exclusively dominated the Mediterranean littoral, and at first the Latin spirit only won foothold for itself in various spots on the western coastas at Aix in Provence (123 B.C.) and at Narbonne (118 B.C.). A refuge of Italian pauperism in the time of the Gracchi, after the triumph of the oligarchy the Narbonnaise became a field for shameless exploitation, besides providing, under the proconsulate of Caesar, an excellent point of observation whence to watch the intestine quarrels between the different nations of Gaul.
These are divided by Caesar in his Commentaries into three groups: the Aquitanians to the south of the Garonne; the Celts, properly so called, from the Garonne to the Seine and the Marne; and the Belgae, from the Seine to the Rhine. But these ethnological names cover a very great variety of half-savage tribes, differing in speech and in institutions, each surrounded by frontiers of dense forests abounding in game. On the edges of these forests stood isolated dwellings like sentinel outposts; while the inhabitants of the scattered hamlets, caves hollowed in the ground, rude circular huts or lake-dwellings, were less occupied with domestic life than with war and the chase. On the heights, as at Bibracte, or on islands in the rivers, as at Lutetia, or protected by marshes, as at Avaricum, oppidaat once fortresses and places of refuge, like the Greek Acropoliskept watch and ward over the beaten tracks and the rivers of Gaul.
These primitive societies of tall, fair-skinned warriors, blueeyed and red-haired, were gradually organized into political bodies of various kindskingdoms, republics and ~ federationsand divided into districts or pagi (pays) InsWztto which divisions the minds of the country folk have tiotis of remained faithfully attached ever since. The victorious Gaul.
aristocracy of the kingdom dominated the other classes, strengthened by the prestige of birth, the ownership of the soil and the practice of arms. Side by side with this martial nobility the Druids constituted a priesthood unique in ancient times; neither hereditary as in India, nor composed of isolated priests as in Greece, nor -of independent colleges as at Rome, it was a true corporation, which at first possessed great moral authority, though by Caesars time it had lost both strength and prestige. Beneath these were the common people attached to the soil, who did not count for much, but who reacted against the insufficient protection of the regular institutions by a voluntary subordination to certain powerful chiefs.
This impotence of the state was a permanent cause of those discords and revolts, which in the 1st century n.c. were so singularly favorable to Caesars ambition. Thus ~rin after eight years of incoherent struggles, of scattered revolts, and then of more and more energetic efforts, Gaul, at last aroused by Vercingetorix, for once concentrated her strength, only to perish at Alesia, vanquished by Roman discipline and struck at from the rear by the conquest of Britain (5850 B.C.).
This defeat completely altered the destiny of Gaul, and she became one of the principal centres of Roman civilization.
Of the vast Celtic empire which had dominated ~si~ Europe nothing now remained but scattered remnants in the farthest corners of the land, refuges for all the vanquished Gaels, Picts or Gauls; and of its civilization there lingered only idioms and dialectsGaelic, Pict and Gallic awhich gradually dropped out of use. During five centuries Gaul was unfalteringly loyal to her conquerors; for to conquer is nothing if the conquered be not assimilated by the conqueror, and Rome was a past-mistress of this art. The personal charm of Caesar and the prestige of Rome are not of themselves sufficient to explain this double conquest. The generous and enlightened policy of the imperial administration asked nothing of the people of Gaul but military service and the payment of the tax; in return it freed individuals from patronal domination, the people from oligarchic greed or Druidic excommunication, and every one in general from material anxiety. Petty tyrannies gave place to the great Fax Romana. The Julio-Claudian dynasty did much to attach the Gauls to the empire; they always occupied the first place in the mind of Augustus, and the revolt of the Aeduan Julius Sacrovir, provoked by the census of AD. 21, was easily repressed by Tiberius. Caligula visited Gaul and founded literary comoetitions at Lyons, which had become the political and intellectual capital of the country. Claudius, who was a native of Lyons, extended the right of Roman citizenship to many of his fellow-townsmen, gave them access to the magistracy and to the senate, and supplemented the annexation of Gaul by that of Britain. The speech which he pronounced on this occasion was engraved on tables of bronze at Lyons, and is the first authentic record of Gauls admission to the citizenship of Rome. Though the crimes of Nero and the catastrophes which resulted from his downfall, provoked the troubles of the year A.D. 70, the revolt of Sabinus was in the main an attemptby the Germans to pillage Gaul and the prelude to military insurrections. The government of the Flavians arid the Antonines completed a definite reconciliation. After the extinction of the family of Augustus in the 1st century Gaul had made many emperorsGalba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Domitian; and in the 2nd century she provided Gauls to rule the empireAntoninus (138161) came from Nfmes and Claudius from Lyons, as did also Caracalla later on (211217).
The romanization of the Gauls, like that of the other subject natior~s, was effected by slow stages and by very diverse means, ~ furnishing an example of the constant adaptability and poiW. of Roman policy. It was begun by establishing a caflrans- network of roads with Lyons as the central point, format Ion and by the development of a, prosperous urban life ~1fR~man in the increasingly wealthy Roman colonies; and it was continued by the disintegration into independent cities of nearly all the Gaulish states of the Narbonnaise, together with the substitution of the Roman collegial magistracy for the isolated magistracy of the Gauls. This alteration came about more quickly in the north-east in the Rhine-land than in the west and the centre, owing to the near neighbsurhood of the legions on the frontiers. Rome was too tolerant to impose her own institutions by force; it was the conquered peoples who collectively and individually solicited as a favor the right ~f adopting the municipal system, the magistracy, the sacerdotal and aristocratic social system of their conquerors. The edict of Caracalla, at the beginning of the 3rd century, by conferring the right of citizenship on all the inhabitants of the empire, completed an assimilation for which commercial relations, schools, a taste for officialism, and the adaptability and quick intelligence of the race had already made preparation. The Gauls now called themselves Romans and their language Romance. There was neither oppression on the one hand nor servility on the other to explain this abandonment of their traditions. Thanks to the political and religious unity which a common worship of the emperor and of Rome gave them, thanks to administrative centralization tempered by a certain amount of municipal autonomy, Gaul prospered throughout three centuries.
But this stability of the Roman peace had barely been realized when events began to threaten it both from within and without. The Fax Romana having rendered any armed force Decline unnecessary amid a formerly very bellicose people, only of the eight legions mounted guard over the Rhine to protect imperial it from the barbarians who surrounded the empire. authiiritv The raids made by the Germanson the easternfrontiers, LU Gaul. the incessant competitions for the imperial power, and the repeated revolts of the Pretorian guard, gradually undermined the internal cohesion of Gaul; while the insurrections of the Bagaudae aggravated the destruction wrought by a grasping treasury and by barbarian incursions; so that the anarchy of the 3rd century soon aroused separatist ideas. Under Postumus Gaul had already attempted to restore an independent though short-lived empire (258267); and twenty-eight years later the tetrarchy of Diocletian proved that the blood now circulated with difficulty from the heart to the extremities of an empire on the eve of disintegration. Rome was to see her universal dominion gradually menaced from all sides. It was in Gaul that the decisive revolutions of the time were first prepared; Constantines crusades to overthrow the altars of paganism, and Julians campaigns to set them up again. After Constantine the emperors of the East in the 4th century merely put in an occasional appearance at Rome; they resided at Milan. or in the prefectorial capitals of Gaulat Arles, at Treves (Trier), at Reims or in Paris. The ancient territorial divisions Belgium, Gallia Lugdunensis (Lyonnaise), Gallia Narbonensis (Narbonnaise)were split up into seventeen little provinces, which in their turn were divided into two dioceses. Thus the great historic division was made between southern and northern France. Roman nationality persisted, but the administrative system was tottering.
Upon ground that had been so well levelled by Roman legislation aristocratic institutions naturally flourished. From the 4th century onward the balance of classes was dis- Soclaidisturbed by the development of a landed aristocracy organizathat grew more powerful day by day, and by the tion of corresponding ruin of the small proprietors and in- GauL
dustrial and commercial corporations. The members of the curia who assisted the magistrates in the cities, crushed by the burden of taxes, now evaded as far as possible public office or senatorial honors. The vacancies left in this middle class by this continual desertion were not compensated for by the progressive advance of a lower class destitute of personal property and constantly unsettled in their work. The peasants, no less than the industrial laborers, suffered from the absence of any capital laid by, which alone could have enabled them to improve their land or to face a time of bad harvests. Having no credit they found themselves at the mercy of their neighbors, the great landholders, and by degrees fell into the position of tenants, or into servitude. The curia was thus emptied both from above and from below. It was in vain that the emperors tried to rivet the chains of the curia in this hereditary bondage, by attaching the small proprietor to his glebe, like the artisan to his gild and the soldier to his legion. To such a miserable pretence of freedom they all preferred servitude, which at least ensured them a livelihood; and the middle class of freemen thus became gradually extinct.
The aristocracy, on the contrary, went on increasing in power, and eventually became masters of the situation. It was through them that the emperor, theoretically absolute, practi~ cally carried on his administration; but he was no land and longer either strong or a divinity, and possessed power by nothing but the semblance of omnipotence. His the aria. official despotism was opposed by the passive but tocracy of.. .
gaul. invincible competition of an aristocracy, more powerful than himself because it derived its support from the revived relation of patron and dependants. But though the aristocracy administered, yet they did not govern. They suffered, as did the Empire, from a general state of lassitude. Like their private life, their public life, no longer stimulated by struggles and difficulties, had become sluggish; their power of initiative was enfeebled. Feeling their incapacity they no longer embarked on great political schemes; and the army, the instrument by which such schemes were carried on, was only held together by the force of habit. In this society, where there was no traffic in anything but wealth and ideas, the soldier was nothing more than an agitator or a parasite. The egoism of the upper classes held military duty in contempt, while their avarice depopulated the countryside, whence the legions had drawn their recruits. And now come the barbarians! A prey to perpetual alarm, the people entrenched themselves behind those high walls of the oppida which Roman security had razed to the ground, but imperial impotence had restored, and where life in the middle ages was destined to vegetate in unrestful isolation.
Amidst this general apathy, intellectual activity alone persisted. In the 4th century there was a veritable renaissance in Gaul, the Intel- last outburst of a dying flame, which yet bore witness lectual also to the general decadence. The agreeable versidecadence fication of an amateur like Ausonius, the refined of GauL panegyrics of a Eumenius, disguising nullity of thought beneath elegance of form, already foretold the perilous sterility of scholasticism. Art, so widespread in the wealthy villas of Gaul, contented itself with imitation, produced nothing original and remained mediocre. Human curiosity, no longer concerned withphilosophy and science, seemed as though stifled, religious polemics alone continuing to hold public attention. Disinclination for the self-sacrifice of active life and weariness of the things of the earth lead naturally to absorption in the things of heaven. After bringing about the success of the Asiatic cults of Mithra and Cybele, these same factors now assured the triumph over exhausted paganism of yet another oriental religionChristianity after a duel which had lasted two centuries.
This new faith had appeared to Constantine likely to infuse young and healthy blood into the Empire. In reality Christianity, which had contributed not a little to stimulate the christIan- political unity of continental Gaul, now tended to Gaul. dissolve it by destroying that religious unity which had heretofore been its complement. Before this there had been complete harmony between Church and State; but afterwards came indifference and then disagreement between political and religious institutions, between the City of God and that of Caesar. Christianity, introduced into Gaul during the 1st century of the Christian era by those foreign merchants who traded along the coasts of the Mediterranean, had by the middle of the 2nd century founded communities at Vienne, at Autun and at Lyons. Their propagandizing zeal soon exposed them to the wrath of an ignorant populace and the contempt of the educated; and thus it was that in AD. 177, under Marcus Aurelius, the Church of Lyons, founded by St Pothinus, suffered those persecutions which were the effective cause of her ultimate victory. These Christian communities, disguised under the legally authorized name of burial societies, gradually formed a vast secret cosmopolitan association, superimposed upon Roman society but incompatible with the Empire. Christianity had to be either destroyed or absorbed. The persecutions under Aurelian and Diocletian almost succeeded in accomplishing the former; the Christian churches were saved by the instability of the existing authorities, by military anarchy and by the incursions of the barbarians. Despite tortures and martyrdoms, and thanks to the seven apostles sent from Rome in 250, during the 3rd century their branches extended all over Gaul.
The emperors had now to make terms with these churches, which served to group together all sorts of malcontents, and this was the object of the edict of Milan (313), Triumph by which the Church, at the outset simply a Jewish of Chrisinstitution, was naturalized as Roman; while in 325 tlanity in the Council of Nicaea endowed her with unity. But ~
for the security and the power thus attained she had to pay with her independence. On. the other hand, pagan and Christian elements in society existed side by side without intermingling, and even openly antagonistic to each otherone aristocratic and the other democratic. In order to induce the masses of the people once more to become loyal to the imperial form of government the emperor Julian tried by founding a new religion to give its functionaries a religious prestige which should impress the popular mind. His plan failed; and the emperor Theodosius, aided by Ambrose, bishop of Milan, preferred to make the Christian clergy into a body of imperial and conservative officials; while in return for their adhesion he abolished the Arian heresy and paganism itself, which could not survive without his support. Thenceforward it was in the name of Christ that persecutions took place in an Empire now entirely won over to Christianity, In Gaul the most famous leader of this first merciless, if still perilous crusade, was a soldier-monk, Saint Martin of Tours. Thanks to him and his disciples in the middle of the 4th century and the beginning of the 5th many of the towns possessed well-established churches; but the C,~h. ~ militant ardour of monks and centuries of labor were needed to conquer the country districts, and in the meantime both dogma and internal organization were subjected to important modifications. As regards the former the Church adopted a course midway between metaphysical explanations and historical traditions, and reconciled the more extreme theories; while with the admission of pagans a great deal of paganism itself was introduced. On the other hand, the need for political and social order involved the necessity for a disciplined and homogeneous religious body; the exercise of power, moreover, soon transformed the democratic Christianity of the earlier churches into a federation of little conservative monarchies. The increasing number of her adherents, and her inexperience of government on such a vast and complicated scale, obliged her to comply with political necessity and to adopt the system of the state and its social customs. The Church was no longer a fraternity, on a footing of equality, with freedom of belief and tentative as to dogma, but an authoritative aristocratic hierarchy. The episcopate was now recruited from the great families in the same way as the imperial and the municipal public services. The Church called on the emperor to convoke and preside over her councils and to combat heresy; and in order more effectually to crush the latter she replaced primitive independence and local diversity by uniformity of doctrine and worship, and by the hierarchy of dioceses and ecclesiastical provinces. The heads of the Church, her bishops, her metropolitans, took the titles of their pagan predecessors as well as their places, and their jurisdiction was enforced by the laws of the state. Rich and powerful chiefs, they were administrators as much as priests:
Germanus (Germain), bishop of Auxerre (d. 448), St Eucherius of Lyons (d. 450), Apollinaris Sidonius of Clermont (d. C. 490) assumed the leadership of society, fed the poor, levied tithes, administered justice, and in the towns where they resided, surrounded by priests and deacons, ruled both in temporal and spiritual matters.
But the humiliation of Theodosius before St Ambrose proved that the emperor could never claim to be a pontiff, and that the dogma of the Church remained independent of the The sovereign as well as of the people; if she sacrificed Chu~J,s her liberty it was but to claim it again and maintain independit more effectively amid the general languor. The ence of the Church thus escaped the unpopularity of this decadent empire, and during the 5th century she provided a refuge for all those who, wishing to preserve the Roman unity, were terrified by the blackness of the horizon. In fact, whilst in the Eastern Church the metaphysical ardour of the Greeks was spending itself in terrible combats in the oecumenical councils over the interpretation of the Nicene Creed, the clergy of Gaul, more simple and strict in their faith, abjured these theological logomachies; from the first they had preferred action to criticism and had taken no part in the great controversy on free-will raised by Pelagius. Another kind of warfare was about to absorb their whole attention; the barbarians were attacking the frontiers of the Empire on every side, and their advent once again modified Gallo-Roman civilization.
For centuries they had been silently massing themselves around ancient Europe, whether Iberian, Celtic or Roman.
Many times already during that evening of a decadent The bat~ civilization, their threatening presence had seemed ii~asion. like a dark cloud veiling the radiant sky of the peoples established on the Mediterranean seaboard. The cruel lightning of the sword of Brennus had illumined the night, setting Rome or Delphi on fire. Sometimes the storm had burst over Gaul, and there had been need of a Marius to stem the torrent of Cimbri and Teutons, or of a Caesar to drive back the Helvetians into their mountains. On the morrow the western horizon would clear again, until some such disaster as that which befell Varus would come to mortify cruelly the pride of an Augustus. The Romans had soon abandoned hope of conquering Germany, with its fluctuating frontiers and nomadic inhabitants. For more than two centuries they had remained prudently entrenched behind the earthworks that extended from Cologne to Ratisbon (Regensburg); but the intestine feuds which prevailed among the barbarians and were fostered by Rome, the organizatipn under bold and turbulent chiefs of the bands greedy for booty, the pressing forward on populations already settled of tribes in their rear; all this caused the Germanic invasion to filter by degrees across the frontier. It was the work of several generations and took various forms, by turns and simultaneously colonization and aggression; but from this time forward the paz romana was at an end. The emperors Probus, Constantine, Julian and Valentinian, themselves foreigners, were worn out with repulsing these repeated assaults, and the general enervation of society did the rest. The barbarians gradually became part of the Roman population; they permeated the army, until after Theodosius they recruited it exclusively; they permeated civilian society as colonists and agriculturists, till the command of the army and of important public duties was given over to a Stiicho or a Crocus. Thus Rome allowed the wolves to mingle with the dogs in watching over the flock, just at a time when the civil wars of the 4th century had denuded the Rhenish frontier of troops, whose numbers had already been diminished by Constantine. Then at the beginning of the 5th century, during a furious irruption of Germans fleeing before Huns, the limes was carried away (406407); and for more than a hundred years the torrent of fugitives swept through the Empire, which retreated behind the Alps, there to breathe its last.
Whilst for ten years Alarics Goths and Stilichos Vandals were drenching Italy with blood, the Vandals and the Alani from the steppes of the Black Sea, dragging in their wake the The reluctant German tribes who had been allies of Rome ~ and who had already settled down to the cultivation of theirlands, invaded the now abandoned Gaul, and having come as far as the Pyrenees, crossed over them. After the passing of this torrent the Visigoths, under their kings Ataulphus, Wallia and Theodoric, still dazzled by the splendours of this immense empire, established themselves like submissive vassals in Aquitaine, with Toulouse as their capital. About the same time the Burgundians settled even more peaceably in Rhenish Gaul, and, after 456, to the west of the Jura in the valleys of The the Sane and the Rhone. The original Franks of Franks Germany, already established in the Empire, and before pressed upon by the same Huns who had already forced CloY S. the Goths across the Danube, passed beyond the Rhine and occupied north-eastern Gaul; Ripuarians of the Rhine establishing themselves on the Sambre and the Meuse, and Salians in Belgium, as far as the great fortified highroad from Bavai to Cologne. Accepted as allies, and supported by Roman prestige and by the active authority of the general Aetius, all these barbarians rallied round him and the Romans of Gaul, and ~fl 431 defeated the hordes of Attila, who had advanced as far as Orleans, at the great battle of the Catalaunian plains.
Thus at the end of the 5th century the Roman empire was nothing but a heap of ruins, and fidelity to the empire was now only maintained by the Catholic Church; she alone The clergy survived, as rich, as much honored as ever, and more and the powerful, owing to the disappearance of the imperial barbarofficials for whom she had found substitutes, and the tans.
decadence of the municipal bodies into whose inheritance she had entered. Owing to her the City of God gradually replaced the Roman imperial polity and preserved its civilization; while the Church allied herself more closely with the new kingdoms than she had ever done with the Empire. In. the Gothic or Burgundian states of the period the bishops, after having for a time opposed the barbarian invaders, sought and obtained from their chief the support formerly received from the emperor. Apollinaris Sidonius paid court to Euric, since 476 the independent king of the Visigoths, against whom he had defended Auvergne; and Avitus, bishop of Vienne, was graciously received by Gundibald, king of the Burgundians. But these princes were Arians, i.e. foreigners among the Catholic population; the alliance sought for by the Church could not reach her from that source, and it was from the rude and pagan Franks that she gained the material support which she still lacked. The conversion of Clovis was a master-stroke; it was fortunate both for himself and for the Franks. Unity in faith brought about unity in law.
Clovis was king of the Sicambrians, one of the tribes of the Salian Franks. Having established themselves in the plains of Northern Gaul, but driven by the necessity of finding new land to cultivate, in the days of their king Childeric they had descended into the fertile valleys of the chief. Somme and the Oise. Cloviss victory at Soissons over the last troops left in the service of Rome (486) extended their settlements as far as the Loire. By his conversion, which was due to his wife Clotilda and to Remigius, bishop of Reims, more than to the victory of Tolbiac over the Alamanni, Clovis made definitely sure of the Roman inhabitants and gave the Church an army (496). Thenceforward he devoted himself to the foundation of the Frankish monarchy by driving the exhausted and demoralized heretics out of Gaul, and by putting himself in the place of the now enfeebled emperor. In 500 he conquered Gundibald, king of the Burgundians, reduced him to a kind of vassalage, and forced him into reiterated promises of conversion to orthodoxy. In 507 he conquered and killed Alaric II., king of the Arian Visigoths, and drove the latter into Spain. Legend adorned his campaign in Aquitaine with miracles; the bishops were the declared allies of both him and his son Theuderich (Thierry) after his conquest of Auvergne. At Tours he received from the distant emperor at Constantinople the diploma and insignia of patricius and Roman consul, which legalized his military conquests by putting him in possession of civil powers. From this time forward a great historic transformation was effected in the eyes of the bishops and of the Gallo-Romans; the Frankish chief took the Clovisar place of the ancient emperors. Instead of blaming ~ him for the murder of the lesser kings of the Franks, his relatives, by which he had accomplished the union of the Frankish tribes, they saw in. this the han.d of God rewarding a faithful soldier and a converted pagan. He became their king, their new David, as the Christian emperors had formerly been; he built churches, endowed monasteries, protected St Vaast (Vedastus, d. 540), first bishop of Arras and Cambrai, who restored Christianity in northern Gaul. Like the emperors before him Clovis, too, reigned over the Church. Of his own authority he called together a council at Orleans in 511, the year of his death. He was already the grand distributor of ecclesiastical benefices, pending the time when his successors were to confirm the episcopal elections, and his power began to take on a more and more absolute character. But though he felt the ascendant influence of Christian teaching, he was not really penetrated by its spirit; a professing Christian, and a friend to the episcopate, Clovis remained a barbarian, crafty and ruthless. The bloody tragedies which disfigured the end of his reign bear sad witness to this; they were a fit prelude to that period during the course of which, as Gregory of Tours said, barbarism was let loose.
The conquest of Gaul, begun by Clovis, was finished by his sons: Theuderich, Chlodomer, Childebert and Clotaire. In three successive campaigns, from 523 to 532, they ~ annihilated the Burgundian kingdom, which had maintained its independence, and had endured for nearly a century. Favored by the war between Justinian, the East Roman emperor, and Theodorics Ostrogoths, the Frankish kings divided Provence among them as they had done in the case of Burgundy. Thus the whole of Gaul was subjected to the sbns of Clovis, except Septimania in the south-east, where the Visigoths still maintained their power. The Frankish armies then overflowed into the neighboring countries and began to pillage them. Their disorderly cohorts made an attack upon Italy, which was repulsed by the Lombards, and another on Spain with the same want of success; but beyond the Rhine they embarked upon the conquest of Germany, where Clovis had already reduced to submission the country on the banks of the Maine, later known. as Franconia. In 531 the Thuringians in the centre of Germany were brought into subjection by his eldest son, King Theuderich, and about the same time the Bavarians were united to the Franks, though preserving a certain autonomy. The Merovingian monarchy thus attained the utmost limits of its territorial expansion, bounded as it was by the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine; it exercised influence over the whole of Germany, which it threw open to the Christian missionaries, and its conquests formed the first beginnings of German history.
But to these wars of aggrandizement and pillage succeeded those fratricidal struggles which disgraced the whole of the sixth ~t century and arrested the expansion of the Merovingian wrs. power. When Clotaire, the last surviving son of Clovis, died in 561, the kingdom was divided between his four sons like some piece of private property, as in 511, and according to the German method. The capitals of these four kingsCharibert, who died in 567, Guntram, Sigebert and Chilpericwere Paris, Orleans, Reims and Soissons all near one another and north of the Loire, where the Germanic inhabitants predominated; but their respective boundaries were so confused that disputes were inevitable. There was no trace of a political idea in these disputes; the mutual hatred of two women aggravated jealousy to the point of causing terrible civil wars from 561 to 613, and these finally created a national conflict which resulted in the dismemberment of the Frankish empire. Recognized, in fact, already as separate provinces were Austrasia, or the eastern kingdom, Neustria, or north-west Gaul and Burgundy; Aquitaine alone was as yet undifferentiated.
Sigebert had married Brunhilda, the daughter of a Visigoth king; she was beautiful and well educated, having been brought up in Spain, where Roman civilization still flourished. Fredegond Chilperic had married Galswintha, one of Brunhildas Beunhilda. sisters, for the sake of her wealth; but despite this marriage he had continued his amours with a waitingwoman named Fredegond, who pushed ambition to the point of crime, and she induced him to get rid of Galswintha. In order to avenge her sister, Brunhilda incited Sigebert to begin a war which terminated in 575 with the assassination of Sigebert by Fredegond at the very moment when, thanks to the help of the Germans, he had gained the victory, and with the imprisonment of Brunhilda at Rouen. Fredegond subsequently caused the death of Merovech (M~rove),the son of Chilperic, who had been secretly married to Brunhilda, and that of Bishop Praetextatus, who had solemnized their union. After this, Fredegond endeavoured to restore imperial finance to a state of solvency, and to set up a more regular form of government in her Neustria, which was less romanized and less wealthy than Burgundy, where Guntram was reigning, and less turbulent than theeastern kingdom, where most of the great warlike chiefs with their large landed estates were somewhat impatient of royal authority. But the accidental death of two of herchildren, the assassination of her husband in 584, and the advice of the Church, induced her to make overtures to her brother-in-law Guntram. A lover of peace through sheer cowardicer and as depraved in his morals as Chilperic, Guntram had played a vacillating and purely self-interested part in the family tragedy. He declared himself the protector of Fredegond, but his death in 593 delivered up Burgundy and Neustria to Brunhildas son Childebert, king of Austrasia, in consequence of the treaty of Andelot, made in 587. An ephemeral triumph, however; for Childebert died in 596, followed a year later by Fredegond.
The whole of Gaul was now handed over to three children:
Childeherts two sons, Theudebert and Theuderich (Thierry), and the son of Fredegond, Clotaire II. The latter, having vanquished the two former at Latofao in 596, was in turn beaten by them at Dormelles in 600, and a year later a fresh fratricidal struggle broke out between the two grandsons of the agedBrunhilda. Theuderich joined with Clotaire against Theodobert, and invaded his brothers kingdom, conquering first an army of Austrasians and then one composed of Saxons and Thuringians. Strife began again in 613 in consequence of Theuderichs desire to join Austrasia to Neustria, but his death delivered the kingdoms into the hands of Clotaire II. This weak king leant for support upon the nobles of Burgundy and Austrasia, impatient as they were of obedience to a woman and the representative of Rome. The ecclesiastical party also abandoned Brunhilda because of her persecution of their saints, after which Clotaire, having now got the upper hand, thanks to the defection of the Austrasian nobles, of Arnulf, bishop of Metz, with his brother Pippin, and of Warnachaire, mayor of the palace, made a terrible end of Brurihilda in 613. Her long reign had not lacked intelligence and even greatness; she alone, amid all these princes, warped by self-indulgence or weakened by discord, had behaved like a statesman, and she alone understood the obligations of the government she had inherited. She wished to abolish the fatal tradition of dividing up the kingdom, which so constantly prevented any possible unity; in opposition to the nobles she used her royal authority to maintain the Roman principles of order and regular administration. Towards the Church she held a courteous but firm policy, renewing relations between the Frankish kingdom and the pope; and she so far maintained the greatness of the Empire that tradition associated her name with the Roman roads in the north of France, entitling them les chausses de Brunehaut.
Like his grandfather, Clotaire Il. reigned over a once more united Gaul of Franks and Gallo-Romans, and like Clovis lie was not too well Obeyed by the nobles; moreover, his had been a victory more for the aristocracy than ~ re for the crown, since it limited the power of the latter. Not that the permanent constitution of the 18th of October 614 was of the nature of an anti-monarchic revolution, for the royal power still remained very great, decking itself with the pompous titles of the Empire, and continuing to bethe dominant institution; but the reservations which Clotaire Ii. had to make in conceding the demands of the bishops and great laymen show the extent and importance of the concessions these latter were already aiming at. The bishops, the real inheritors of the imperial idea of government, had become great landowners through enormous donatkins made to the Church, and allied as they were to the aristocracy, whence their ranks were continually recruited, they had gradually identified themselves with the interests of their class and had adopted its customs; while thanhi to long minorities and civil wars the aristocracy of the high officials had taken an equally important social position. The treaty of Andelot in 587 had already decided that the benefices or lands granted to them by the kings should be held for life. In the 7th century the Merovingian kings adopted the custom of summoning them all, and not merely the officials of their Palatium, to discuss political affairs; they began, moreover, to choose their counts or administrators from among the great landholders. This necessity for approval and support points to yet another alteration in the nature of the royal power, absolute as it was in theory.
The Mayoralty of the Palace aimed a third and more serious blow at the royal authority. By degrees, the high officials of the - Pal atium, whether secular or ecclesiastical, The and also the provincial counts, had rallied round mayorS of the palace. the mayors of the palace as their real leaders. As under the Empire, the Palatium was both royal court and centre of government, with the same bureaucratic hierarchy and the same forms of administration; and the mayor of the palace was premier official of this itinerant court and ambulatory government. Moreover, since the palace controlled the whole of each kingdom, the mayors gradually extended their official authority so as to include functionaries and agents of every kind, instead of merely those attached immediately to the kings person. They suggested candidates for office for the royal selection, often appointed office-holders, and, by royal warrant, supported or condemned them. Mere subordinates while the royal power was strong, they had become, owing to the frequent minorities, and to civil wars which broke the tradition of obedience, the all-powerful ministers of kings nominally absolute but without any real authority. Before long they ceased to claim an even greater degree of independence than that of Warnachaire, who forced Clotaire II. to swear that he should never be deprived of his mayoralty of Burgundy; they wished to take the first place in the kingdoms they governed, and to be able to attack neighboring kingdoms on their own account. A struggle, motived by self-interest, no doubt; but a struggle, too, of opposing principles. Since the Frankish monarchy was now in their power some of ,them tried to reestablish the unity of that monarchy in all its integrity, together with the superiority of the State over the Church; others, faithless to the idea of unity, saw in the disintegration of the state and the supremacy of the nobles a warrant for their own independence. These two tendencies, were destined to strive ~against one another during an entire century (613714), and to occasion two periods of violent conflict, which, divided by a kind of renascence of royalty, were to end at last in the triumphant substitution of the Austrasian mayors for royalty and aristocracy alike.
The first struggle began on the accession of Clotaire II., when Austrasia, having had a king of her own ever since 561,
~, ~ demanded one now. In 623 Clotaire was obliged to send her his son Dagobert and even to extend his between territory. But in Dagoberts name two men ruled, monarchy representing the union of the official aristocracy and ~yoi.~ty the Church. One, Pippin of Landen, derived his power from his position as mayor of the palace, from great estates in Aquitaine and between the Meuse and the Rhine, and from the immense number of his supporters; the other, Arnulf, bishop of Metz, sprang from a great family, probably of Roman descent, and was besides immensely wealthy in worldly possessions. By the union of their forces Pippin and Arnulf were destined to shape the future. They had already, in 613, treated with Clotaire and betrayed the hopes of Brunhilda, being consequently rewarded with the guardianship of young Dagobert. Burgundy followed the example of Austrasia, demanded the abolition of the mayoralty, and in 627 succeeded in obtaining her independence of Neustria and Austrasia and direct relations with the king.
The death of Clotaire (629) was the signal for a revival of the royal power. Dagobert deprived Pippin of Landen of his authority and forced him to fly to Aquitaine; ~ but still he had to give the Austrasians his son Sigebert monarchy III. for their king (634). He made administrative under progresses through Neustria and Burgundy to recall ~ the nobles to their allegiance, but again he was forced to designate his second son Clovis as king of Neustria.
He did subdue Aquitaine completely, thanks to his brother Charibert, with whom he had avoided dividing the kingdom, and he tried to restore his own demesne, which had been despoiled by the granting of benefices or by the pious frauds of the Church. In short, this reign was one of great conquests, impossible except under a strong government. Dagoberts victories over Samo, king of the Slays along the Elbe, and his subjugation of the Bretons and the Basques, maintained the prestige of the Frankish empire; while the luxury of his court, his taste for the fine arts (ministered to by his treasurer Eloi i), his numerous achievements in architectureespecially the abbey of St Denis, burial-place of the kings of Francethe brilliance and the power of the churchmen who surrounded him and his revision of the Salic law, ensured for his reign, in spite of the failure of his plans for unity, a fame celebrated in folksong and ballad.
But for barbarous nations old-age comes early, and after Dagoberts death (639), the monarchy went swiftly to its doom. The mayors of the palace again became supreme, The Roes and the kings not only ceased to appoint them, but falnnnis might not even remove them from office. Such mayors .(dowere Aega and Erchinoald, in Neustria, Pippin and Otto in Austrasia, and Flaochat in Burgundy. One nffS).
of them, Grimoald, son of Pippin, actually dared to take the title of king in Austrasia (640). This was a premature attempt and barren of result, yet it was significant; and not less so is the fact that the palace in which these mayors bore rule was a huge association of great personages, laymen and ecciesiastics who seem to have had much more independence than in the 6th century. We find the dukes actually raising troops without the royal sanction, and even against the king. In 64! the mayor Flaochat was forced to swear that they should hold their offices for life; and though these offices were not yet hereditary, official dynasties, as it were, began to be established permanently within the palace. The crown lands, the governorships, the different offices, were looked upon as common property to be shared between themselves. Organized into a compact body they surrounded the king and were far more powerful than he. In the general assembly of its members this body of officials decided the selection of the mayor; it presented Flaochat to the choice of Queen Nanthilda, Dagoberts widow; after long discussion it appointed Ebroin as mayor; it submitted requests that were in reality commands to the Assembly of Bonneuil in 616 and later to Childeric in 670. Moreover, the countries formerly subdued by the Franks availed themselves of this opportunity to loosen the yoke; Thuringia was lost by Sigebert in 641, and the revolt of Alamannia in 643 set back the frontier of the kingdom from the Elbe to Austrasia. Aquitaine, hitherto the common prey of all the Frankislh kings, having in vain tried to profit by the struggles between Fredegond and Brunhilda, and set up an independent king, Gondibald, now finally burst her bonds in 670. Then came a time when the kings were mere children, honored with but the semblance of respect, under the tutelage of a single mayor, ErbroIn of Neustria.
This representative of royalty, chief minister for four-andtwenty years (656681), attempted the impossible, endeavouring to re-establish unity in the midst of general dissolution and to maintain intact a royal authority usurped between everywhere by the hereditary power of the great Ebromn and palatine families. He soon stirred up against himself Le~er.
all the dissatisfied nobles, led by Lger (Leodegarius), bishop of Autun and his brother Gerinus. Clotaire III.s death gave the signal for war. Ebromns enemies set up Childeric II. in opposition to Theuderich, the king whom he had chosen without summoning the great provincial officials. Despite a temporary triumph, when Childeric was forced to recognize the principle of hereditary succession in public offices, and when the mayoralties of Neustria and Burgundy were alternated to the profit of both, Lger soon fell into disgrace and was exiled to that very monastery of Luxeuil to which Ebromn had been relegated. Childeric having regained the mastery restored the mayors office, which was immediately disputed by the two rivals; Ebroin was successful and established himself as mayor of the palace in the room of Leudesius, a partisan of Lger (675),
St Eligius, bishop of Noyon, apostle of the Belgians and Frisians (d. 659?).
following this up by a distribution of offices and dignities right and left among his adherents. Lger was put to death in 678, and the Austrasians, commanded by the Carolingian Pippin II., with whom many of the chief Neustrians had taken refuge, were dispersed near Laon (680). But EbroIn was assassinated next year in the midst of his triumph, having like Fredegond been unable to do more than postpone for a quarter of a century the victory of the nobles and of Austrasia; for his successor, Berthar, was unfitted to carry on his work, having neither his gifts and energy nor the powerful personality of Pippin. Berthar met his death at the battle of Tertry (687), which B ~ gave the king into the hands of Pippin, as also the T:rt,y. royal treasure and the mayoralty, and by thus enabling him to reward his followers made him supreme over the Merovingian dynasty. Thenceforward the degenerate descendants of Clovis offered no further resistance to his claims, though it was not unti 752 that their line became extinct.
In that year the Merovingian dynasty gave place to the rule of Pippin II. of Heristal, who founded a Carolingian empire fated to be as ephemeral as that of the Merovingians. This political victory of the aristocracy was merely the consummation of a slow subterranean revolution which by innumerable reiterated blows had sapped the structure of the body politic, and was about to transfer the people of Gaul from the Roman monarchical and administrative government to the sway of the feudal system.
The Merovingian kings, mere war-chiefs before the advent of Clovis, had after the conquest of Gaul become absolute hereditary causes of nionarchs, thanks to the disappearance of the popular the failof assemblies and to the perpetual state of warfare. the Mero- They concentrated in their own hands all the powers vingians, of the empire, judicial, fiscal and military; and even the so-called rois fainants enjoyed this unlimited power, in spite of the general disorder and the civil wars. To make their authority felt in the provinces they had an army of officials at their disposala legacy, this, from imperial Rome who represented them in the eyes of their various peoples. They had therefore only to keep up this established government, but they could not manage even this much; they allowed the idea of the common interests of kings and their subjects gradually to die out, and forgetting that national taxes are a necessary impost, a charge for service rendered by the state, they had treated these as though they were illicit and unjustifiable spoils. The taxpayers, with the clergy at their head, adopted the same idea, and every day contrived fresh methods of evasion. Merovingian justice was on the same footing as Merovingian finance: it was arbitrary, violent and self-seeking. The Church, too, never failed to oppose itat first not so much on account of her own ambitions as in a more Christian spiritand proceeded to weaken the royal jurisdiction by repeated interventions on behalf of those under sentence, afterwards depriving it of authority over the clergy, and then setting up ecclesiastical tribunals in opposition to those held by the dukes and counts. At last, just as the kingdom had become the personal property of the king, so the officialsdukes, counts, royal vicars, tribunes, centenariiwho had for the most part bought their unpaid offices by means of presents to the monarch, came to look upon the public service rather as a mine of official wealth than as an administrative organization for furthering the interests, material or moral, of the whole nation. They became petty local tyrants, all the more despotic because they had nothing to fear save the distant authority of the kings missi, and the more rapacious because they had no salary save the fines they inflicted and the fees that they contrived to multiply. Gregory of Tours tells us that they were robbers, not protectors of the people, and that justice and the whole administrative apparatus were merely engines of insatiable greed. It was the abuses thus committed by the kings and their agents, who did not understand the art of gloving the iron hand, aided by the absolutely unfettered licence of conduct and the absence of any popular liberty, that occasioned the gradual increase of charters of immunity.
Immunity was the direct and personal privilege which forbade any royal official or his agents to decide cases, to levy taxes, or to exercise any administrative control on the domains of a bishop, an abbot, or one of the great secular iflmunlty~ nobles. On thousands of estates the royal government gradually allowed the law of the land to be superseded by locaL law, and public taxation to change into special contributions; so that the duties of the lower classes towards the state were transferred to the great landlords, who thus became loyal adherents of the king but absolute masters on their own territory. The Merovingians had no idea that they were abdicating the least part of their authority, nevertheless the deprivations acquiesced in by the feebler kings led of necessity to the diminution of their authority and their judicial powers, and to the abandonment of public taxation. They thought that by granting immunity they would strengthen their direct control; in reality they established the local independence of the great landowners, by allowing royal rights to pass into their hands. Then came confusion between the rights of the sovereign and the rights of property. The administrative machinery of the state still existed, but it worked in empty air: its taxpayers disappeared, those who were amenable to its legal jurisdiction slipped from its grasp, -and the number of those whose affairs it should have directed dwindled away. Thus the Merovirigians had shown themselves incapable of rising above the barbarous notion that royalty is a personal asset to the idea that royalty is of the state, a power belonging to the nation and instituted for the benefit of all. They represented in society nothing more than a force which grew feebler and feebler as other forces grew strong; they never stood for a national magistracy.
Society no le~s than the state was falling asunder by a gradual process of decay. Under the Merovingians it was a hierarchy wherein grades were marked by the varied scale of the Disruption wergild, a man being worth anything from thirty to six of the hundred gold pieces. The different degrees were those social of slave, freedman, tenant-farmer and great landowner.
As in every social scheme where the government is wor without real power, the weakest sought protection of the strongest; and the system of patron, client and journeyman, which had existed among the Romans, the Gauls and the Germans, spread rapidly in the 6th and 7th centuries, owing to public disorder and the inadequate protection afforded by the government. The Churchs patronage provided some with a refuge from violence; others ingratiated themselves with the rich for the sake of shelter and security; others again sought place and honor from men of power; while women, churchmen and warriors alike claimed the kings direct and personal pro tection. - - -
This hierarchy of persons, these private relations of man to man, were recognized by custom in default of the law, and were soon strength ned by another and territorial hierarchy.
The heneThe large estate, especially if it belonged to the Church, ficium.
very soon absorbed the few fields of the freeman.
In order to farm these, the Church and the rich landowners granted back the holdings on the temporary and conditional terms of tenancy-at-will or of the beneficium, thus multiplying endlessly the land subject to their overlordship and the men who were dependent upon them as tenants. The kings, like private individuals and ecclesiastical establishments, made use of the beneficium to reward their servants; till finally their demesne was so reduced by these perpetual grants that they took to distributing among their champions land owning the overlordship of the Church, or granted their own lands for single lives only. These various benefactions were, as a rule, merely the indirect methods which the great landowners employed in order to absorb the small proprietor. And so well did they succeed, that in the 6th and 7th centuries the provincial hierarchy consisted of the cultivator, the holder of the benejicium and the owner; while this dependence of one man upon another affected the personal liberty of a large section of the community, as well as the condition of the land. The great landowner tended to become not only lord over his tenants, but also himself a vassal of the king.
Thus by means of immunities, of the beneficium nnd of patronage, society gradually organized itself independently of the state, since it required further security. Such ~of extra security was first provided by the conqueror of Tertry; for Pippin II. represented the two great families of Pippin and of Arnulf, and consequently the two interests then paramount, i.e. land and religion, while he had at his back a great company of followers and vast landed estates. For forty years (6f5655) the office of mayor of Austrasia had gone down in his family almost continuously in direct descent from father to son. The death of Grimoald had caused ,the loss of this post, yet Ansegisus (Ansegisel), Arnulfs son and Pippins son-in-law, had continued to hold high office in the Austrasian palace; and about 680 his son, Pippin II., became master of Austrasia, although he had held no previous office in the palace. His dynasty was destined to supplant that of the Merovingian house.
Pippin of Heristal was a pioneer; he it was who began. all that his descendants were afterwards to carry through. Thus he gathered the nobles about him not by virtue of his position, but because of his own personal prowess, and because he could assure them of justice and protection; instead of being merely the head of the royal palace he was the absolute lord of his own followers. Moreover, he no longer bore the title of mayor, but that of duke or prince of the Franks; and the mayoralty, like the royal power now reduced to a shadow, became an hereditary possession which Pippin could bestow upon his sons. The reigns of Theuderich III., Clovis III. or Childebert III. are of no significance except as serving to date charters and diplomas. Pippin it was who administered justice in Austrasia, appointed officials and distributed dukedoms; and it was Pippin, the ~ilitary leader, who defended the frontiers threatened by Frisians, Alamanni and Bavarians. Descended as he was from Arnuif, bishop of Metz, he was before all things a churchman, and behind his armies marched the missionaries to whom the Carolingian dynasty, of which he was the founder, were to subject all Christendom. Pippin it was, in short, who governed, who set in order the social confusions of Neustria, who, after long wars, put a stop to the malpractices of the dukes and counts, and summoned councils of bishops to make good regulations. But at his death in. 714 the child-king Dagobert III. found himself subordinated to Pippins two grandsons, who, being minccrs, were under the wardship of their grandmother Plectrude.
Pippins work was almost un.donea party among the Neustrians under Raginfrid, mayor of the palace, revolted against Pippin IIs adherents, and Radbod, duke of Charles the Frisians, joined them. But the Austrasians (fl54,4J) appealed to an illegitimate son of Pippin, Charles Martel, who had escaped from the prison to which Plectrude, alarmed at his prowess, had consigned him, and took him for their leader. With Charles Martel begins the great period of Austrasian history. Faithful to the traditions of the Austrasian mayors, he chose kings for himselfClotaire IV., then Chilperic II. and lastly Theuderich IV. After Theuderichs death (737) he left the throne vacant until 742, but he himself was king in all but name; he presided over the royal tribunals, appointed the royal officers, issued edicts, disposed of the funds of the treasury and the churches, conferred immunities upon adherents, who were no longer the kings nobles but his own, and even appointed the bishops, though there was nothing of the ecclesiastic about himself. He decided questions of war and peace, and re-established unity in Gaul by defeating the Neustrians and the Aquitanian followers of Duke Odo (Eudes) at Vincy in 717. When Odo, brought to bay, appealed for help to the Arab troops of Abd-arRahman, who after conquering Spain had crossed the Pyrenees, Charles, like a second Clovis, saved Catholic Christendom in its peril by crushing the Arabs at Tours (732). The retreat of the Arabs, who were further weakened by religious disputes, enabled him to restore Frankish rule in Aquitaine in spite of Hunald, son of Odo. But Charless longest expeditions were made into Germany, and in these he sought the support of the Church, then the greatest of all powers since it was the depositary of the Roman imperial tradition.
No less unconscious of his mission than Clovis had been, Charles Martel also was a soldier of Christ. He protected the missionaries who paved the way for his militant invasions. Without Charles him the apostle of Germany, the English monk Boniface, Martel would never have succeeded in preserving the purity and the of the faith and keeping the bishops submissive to Chumh. the Holy See. The help given by Charles had two very farreaching results. Boniface was the instrument of the union of Rome and Germany, of which union the Holy Roman Empire in Germany was in the 10th century to become the most perfect expression, continuing up to the time of Luther. And Boniface also helped on the alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty, which, more momentous even than that between Clovis and the bishops of Gaul, was to sanctify might by right.
This union was imperative ~r the bishops of Rome if they wished to establish their supremacy, and their care for orthodoxy by no means excluded all desire of domination. Mere Charles religious authority did not secure to them the obedience Marie! and of either the faithful or the clergy; moreover, they aregory had to consider the great secular powers, and in this sb.
respect their temporal position in Italy was growing unbearable. Their relations with the East Roman emperor (sole lord of the world after the Roman Senate had sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople in 476) were confined to receiving insults from him or suspecting him of heresy. Even in northern Italy there was no longer any opposition to the progress of the Lombards, the last great nation to be established towards the end of the 6th century within the ancient Roman empire~-their king Liudprand clearly intended to seize Italy and even Rome itself. Meanwhile from the south attacks were being made by the rebel dukes of Spoleto and Beneventum. Pope Gregory III. cherished dreams of an alliance with the powerful duke of the Franks, as St Remigius before him had thought of uniting with Clovis against the Goths. Charles Martel had protected Boniface on his German missions: he would perhaps lend Gregory the support of his armies. But the warrior, like. Clovis aforetime, hesitated to put himself at the disposal of the priest. When it was a question of winning followers or keeping them, he had not scrupled to lay hands on ecclesiastical property, nor to fill the Church with his friends and kinsfolk, and this alliance might embarrass him. So if he loaded the Roman ambassadors with gifts in 739, he none the less remembered that the Lombards had just helped him to drive the Saracens from Provence. However, he died soon after this, on the 22nd of October 74, and Gregory III. followed him almost immediately.
Feeling his end near, Charles, before an assembly of nobles, had divided his power between his two sons, Carloman and Pippin III. The royal line seemed to have been forgotten for six years, but in 742 Pippin brought a lit son of Chilperic II. out of a monastery and made him d. king. This Childeric III. was but a shadowand knew it. He made a phantom appearance once every spring at the opening of the great annual national convention known as
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'France History'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/f/france-history.html. 1910.
