Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

tilled a portion of land amongst them, and paid their rent or contribution in the mass. When the slave was promoted to be lete, the lete was, by the rise in the value of man, promoted to be the churchman or the warrior. It is a law of society, that the upper class die off, and the void is supplied by the class below. This can nowhere be so decidedly the case, as where the upper class claim the exclusive right of making war. The conquering barbarian did this for a time. But they soon required soldiers of other races, especially when they became aristocratical and went to war with a following. There ensued a continual drafting of the letes from the soil to be made use of as warriors and freemen. In order to do this it was necessary to emancipate the lete, and a very simple form of doing so (per denarium) before the king at once raised a man to the free warrior class. The proofs of this upward movement are already to be found in the laws procured by ecclesiastics. The church and the convents were very forward to raise their slaves into tributaries or letes. The monks even completed their own ranks from the same class, which, by the education they obtained, also made their way into the dignities of the church. The clergy at the same time favoured the conversion of the slaves on lay properties into letes also. They lent their churches as the registries of their freedom, and became thus the defenders of it. But having done this, the clergy began to perceive that the demand for men caused their letes to be taken from them and converted into warriors. They therefore procured a law forbidding any lete or tributary of the church to jactare denarium before the king, and thus be promoted from the class of church tenant to a member of the military grade of society. At a period somewhat later, when the upper clergy came to resemble the holders of fiefs, the Frank nobles objected to letes being promoted in the church, and coming to rival and counteract them in places of au

CHAP.

1.

I

CHAP. thority and influence. This is a great complaint of historians of the reign of Louis the Pious. All these are indications of an upward movement in society, which emancipated and almost abolished that lowest class of servility. This upward movement may however have been afterwards stopped, when feudalism had assumed a definite shape, when land became occupied, military force and chieftainship local. And thus the peasant lingered for many centuries as a serf, till the development of wealth and the accumulation of money came to give society a new and a different impulse. That of the first ages of the modern world was limited to the destruction of the classification of society which existed in the ancient world. In it men were slaves, citizens, functionaries, or emperor. The modern world came forth without these. It presented a territorial aristocracy, replacing the functionary and exercising his authority, nullifying the emperor, ignoring the citizen, and with an agricultural class in many grades, but never descending to the abjectness of the slave.

One of the first acts of Louis the Pious, was to appoint his two younger sons kings of separate regions, reserving for the elder, Lothaire, the seat of empire and power in the north, stretching east and west of Aix, to the ocean and the Elbe. To his son Pepin, he gave the south of France, from the Pyrenees across to Autun. To Louis, he gave Bavaria, Carinthia, Bohemia, and the lands conquered from Slavons and Avars, adding the imperial villas and property which Charlemagne had reserved in these regions. These two monarchs, as well as Bernard, king of Italy, nephew of Louis, were ordered to pay respect and make presents, not only to the existing emperor, but to his son Lothaire, his future successor, as their Senior*, and to adopt no measure of foreign policy without his concurrence. Against this arrangement, Bernard of Italy protested, *Which in the capitularies means suzerain, or lord.

and came in arms to occupy the passes of the Alps. Repenting, however, of his rashness, he hastened to implore the pardon of Louis, who, for reply, caused him to be tried by the Frank nobles at Aix. These, probably anxious for Italian confiscation, condemned Bernard to death. The emperor's councillors commuted the punishment to loss of sight, which was so cruelly executed, that Bernard died; an event that awakened the contrition and horror of the emperor.

Thus, in a very short time after the death of Charlemagne, commenced the struggle between the princes who wore the title and put forward the pretensions of emperor, and the inferior monarchs infeodated to him, who were prompted to resistance by their noblesse. It was the great aim of Louis to counteract this tendency of the several European regions to fall asunder, and localise their administration, by maintaining members of the same family upon the different thrones. But the monarch married late in life Judith, a daughter of the House of Guelph, by whom he had a young son, named Charles, the future Charles the Bald. To provide a heritage for him, became the care of his mother, and of course of the emperor. This led to re-arrangements and preferency, which indisposed the princes by the former marriage, and led to a series of rebellions and civil wars. In 830, his three sons seized the emperor, and shut up the Empress Judith in a convent. contrived, while a captive, to win upon his eldest son, Lothaire, and induce him to call a general assembly at Nimeguen. Here the Germans and Northerns predominating, declared for the emperor, against his sons of Aquitaine and Bavaria. During the rest of his reign, the brothers ceased not to dispute possession of their father's person and authority. Pepin of Aquitaine, and Louis of Bavaria, were leagued in general against the Emperor and his eldest Lothaire. The latter, as the heir of the empire, embraced the cause of his sire, and

Louis

CHAP.
I.

CHAP. joined with it that of Charles his youngest son. had had Suabia given him at one time.

I.

Charles But he

afterwards agreed with Lothaire to make a more equal division; the latter taking all eastwards of the Rhine and the Meuse, Charles taking all westward of these rivers; one of the first attempts to form a separate kingdom of what has since become France. In the midst of these partitions and disorders, having alternated during the latter years of his reign between the throne and the cloister, Louis the Pious expired at Ingelheim, in 840.

It was no doubt the respect borne to him as the son of Charlemagne, that had enabled Louis so often to recover, and to the last to wield, the authority of emperor. When at his death that dignity devolved upon Lothaire, the antagonistic principle of local sovereignty asserting its independence was developed with more force. Whilst at the same time numbers of lesser chieftains, dukes, and counts start up to assume an independent place in history. When, on his father's death, Lothaire at the head of an army of Lombard followers crossed the Alps, and summoned the Franks to do him homage as emperor, Louis of Bavaria, or South Germany, refused to acknowledge his brother as superior. Charles, master of Neustria and of the west, although at strife with his nephew Pepin, who claimed his father's heritage in Aquitaine, showed equal reluctance to acknowledge any suzerainty in Lothaire. The latter marched, first against one, then against the other, but shrunk from fighting a decisive battle with either. Lothaire's claim as emperor was supported by almost all the clergy, following the traditional hatred of Rome to local sovereignty. And he was also supported by those great nobles, who had already arisen in the centre of France. These were, Adalbert, Count of Metz, the Count of Paris, and the Count of Vermandois. In 841, Louis and Charles united their forces, the former

having brought with him a large south German army
They first crushed and slew Adalbert of Metz; and
then marched to meet Lothaire, who had been joined
by the Aquitans. The armies joined battle in June, at
Fontenailles, a village not far from Auxerre: where
Charles fought in person, he was obliged to retreat,
but his general, Adelhard, maintained a more equal con-
flict;
whilst Louis and the Germans defeated the troops
of Lothaire and gained the victory. Forty thousand
men, says Agnelli, fell in the action. And Hincmar
writes, that no such slaughter had taken place since the
battle of Vincy.

The empire which Charlemagne had founded, may be said to have perished on this occasion. Lothaire, who headed and represented it, was defeated by the forces of Neustria and of Germany. Being mainly won by German over Frank, the victory of Fontenailles destroyed the old supremacy, which had been so long wielded from the left bank of the Rhine over the regions eastward of that river. The Germans were evidently then superior in war to the races westward of the Rhine. They mustered in greater masses, and being in contact with hostile races, were more accustomed to combat. Charles evidently could not maintain his independence in the west without German aid. And although he was thereby enabled to shake off Lothaire's supremacy as emperor, he was still unable to subdue that region, emphatically called France, which extended between Seine and Meuse, and of which the chieftains, though they could not make Lothaire's right as emperor prevail, were determined and able to maintain him as their own local king.*

This rendered Lothaire still formidable, and compelled his brothers to conclude one of the most solemn

Nithard calls these chieftains Francos. He makes Charles proceed through Beauvais, Compiegne,

Soissons, and Rheims to see if the
Franks (Franci) would join him.

CHAP.

I.

« AnteriorContinuar »