g

reduced to bondage in his own time. But the usual practice of the west was different. In donations of land to the church, the serfs passed with the soil, as in other transfers. Bishops were restrained by a regard for the property of their churches from emancipating the serfs who belonged to these; the fourth council of Toledo (A.D. 633) declared such emancipation to be a robbery of the church; it enacted that the next bishop should assert his right over any persons whom his predecessor had thus wrongfully liberated, and that any bishop wishing to emancipate a slave should indemnify the church by providing another in his stead.' An earlier council-that of Agde, in 506-had restrained the power of bishops to alienate slaves; and, in a spirit curiously opposed to the oriental principles, it forbade monks to manumit their slaves, "lest they should keep holiday while the monks work." k

Yet with all this the church did very much to abate the evils of slavery. It insisted on the natural equality of men, and on the brotherhood of Christians, as motives to kindness towards slaves; and in the treatment of its own dependents it held out an example to lay masters." It threw open its sanctuaries to those who fled from cruelty; it secured their pardon before surrendering them to their owners; it denounced excommunication against any master who should break a promise made to a fugitive slave. It placed the killing of a slave without judicial authority on the same footing of guilt as the killing of a freeman. It endeavoured to restrain the sale of slaves, by limiting the power which parents among the heathen nations exercised over their own offspring, and by prohibiting that any should be sold to Jews or heathens." It declared who sell their children (Pœnit. iv. 26. p. 381),—a seeming inconsistency, which is explained by supposing the excommunication to apply to the case of boys over seven years of age. Kemble, i.

& C. 10; comp. the will of Elfric, archbishop of Canterbury, A.D. 1006, in the Abingdon Chronicle, i. 419.

Planck, ii. 348-350.

i Cc. 67-8.

k C. 56.

199-200.

૧

E. g. Cod. Theod. III. i. 5; Cod. Just. I. iii. 56. 3; I. x.; Gregor. Epp. i. 10; ix. 36, and elsewhere; Conc. Cabil. A.D. 650, c. 9; Conc. Tolet. x. A.D. (56, c. 7; Laws of Ina, A.D. 696, c. 11 (Thorpe, 48); Capit. Mantuan. c. 7 (Pertz, i. 41). Constantius had forbidden the sale of even a heathen slave to a Jew, lest his conversion should be hindered (Biot, 138). Gregory III. charges Boniface to prevent Christians from selling slaves to pagans for sacrifice (Ep. i. 8; Patrol. lxxxix.). There is a remarkable letter of Adrian I. to Charlemagne, who had been told that

t

the enfranchisement of slaves to be a work conducive to salvation," and it was through the influence of the church that innumerable masters directed by their wills that their slaves should be set free "for the deliverance of their own souls." The liberation was often, as under the Roman law, visibly associated with religion by being performed in church: the master at the altar resigned his slave to the church, with which the freedman was thenceforth connected by a peculiar tie-he and his descendants paying some slight acknowledgment to it, while, in the failure of posterity, the church was heir to his property."

There was also another way by which the church signally contributed to raise the estimation of the servile classes. As the freemen of the conquering nations were prevented from becoming clergy or monks without the sovereign's leave, in order that he might not lose their military service, the bishops were obliged to recruit the ranks of their clergy chiefly from the classes which were below the obligation to such service. The fourth council of Toledo requires that serfs ordained to be clergy should be emancipated; but it was not until the year 817, in the reign of Louis the Pious, that a similar law was established in France," although before that time the clergy of servile race had been exempted from servile duties. The serf, when ordained, became capable of rising to honour and power; when promoted beyond the minor orders, he was assessed at a wehr corresponding to that of high secular rank; and this rose with each step to which he was advanced in the hierarchy. The clergy who had thus been raised from a servile condition to dignity and influence felt themselves bound (apart from all religious motives) to labour for the benefit of the class to which they had originally belonged, and a general elevation of that class was the result.

the Romans had sold slaves to the Saracens, apparently with the pope's sanction. Adrian, with much indignant language, endeavours to clear himself of the imputation, and throws the blame on Greeks and Lombards, whom, he says, he had attempted to check, but in vain, as he had not ships to enforce his wishes (Bouquet, v. 557). On the sale of slaves to the Saracens, which was chiefly carried on by the Venetians, see Leo, Gesch. v. Italien, i. 223-6.

• See Marculf, ii. 32 (Patrol. lxxxvii.). Planck, ii. 360-1; Turner, Hist. Anglos. iii. 480; Kemble, ii. 212.

Conc. Tolet. iv. A.D. 633, cc. 70-1; Planck, ii. 360; Kemble, i. 224; Rettb. ii. 736. See in Chron. Casin. i. 10 (Pertz, vii.), the donation made by a citizen of

Benevento, A.D. 771, to the monastery of Monte Cassino.

* Planck, ii. 352; Neand. v. 135. For the laws as to ordination of slaves, see Gratian, Dist. 54 (Patrol. clxxxvii.).

A.D. 633. C. 74. Justinian had forbidden that slaves should be ordained, even with the leave of their masters; because these, by freeing them, could open the lawful path to ordination (Cod. Just. I. iii. 37); but afterwards ordination itself emancipated. See the notes, 1. c., and comp. Novell. cxxiii. 17; Leo, Const. 9, 11.

Capit. Generale, c. 6; Planck, ii. 355. The form then used is in Bouquet, vi. 447. Planck, ii. 354-6. b See p. 207. Planck, ii. 356-8; Guizot, ii. 32.

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The advancement of persons servilely born to high ecclesiastical station was not, however, unattended by a mixture of bad effects. Thegan, the biographer of Louis the Pious, gives a very unfavourable representation of such clergy. He tells us that, when they have attained to offices of dignity, the gentleness of their former manners is exchanged for insolence, quarrelsomeness, domineering, and assumption; that they emancipate their relations, and either provide for them by church-preferment or marry them into noble families; and that these upstarts are insufferably insolent to the old nobility. The picture is no doubt coloured both by Thegan's prejudices as a man of high birth, and by his indignation. at the behaviour of some ecclesiastics towards his unfortunate sovereign; but the parallels both of history and of our own experience may assure us of its substantial truth.

d

d Vita Hludov. 20. (Pertz. ii.) On the gradual disappearance of slavery in

France, see Thierry, sur le Tiers Etat, 10, seqq.

BOOK IV.

FROM THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE TO THE DEPOSITION OF POPE GREGORY VI., A.D. 814-1046.

CHAPTER I.

LOUIS THE PIOUS (A.D. 814-840) — END OF THE CONTROVERSY AS TO IMAGES (A.D. 813-842)-THE FALSE DECRETALS.

I. THE great defect of Charlemagne's system was, that it required a succession of such men as himself to carry it on. His actual successors were sadly unequal to sustain the mighty burden of the empire.

A.D. 813.

Feeling the approach of his end, Charlemagne, after obtaining the concurrence of the national diet, summoned his only surviving legitimate son, Louis, from Aquitaine to Aixla-Chapelle, where, in the presence of a vast assemblage, he declared him his colleague and successor." He exhorted the prince as to the duties of sovereignty, and received from him a promise of obedience to his precepts. He then desired Louis to advance to the high altar, on which an imperial crown was placed, to take the crown, and with his own hands to place it on his head —an act by which the emperor intended to assert that he and his posterity derived their title neither from coronation by the pope nor from the acclamations of the Romans, but immediately from God. After this inauguration, Louis returned to the government of Aquitaine, but was soon again summoned to Aix-la-Chapelle, in consequence of his father's death, which took place in January 814.a

The chief authorities for the reign of Louis are the lives by Thegan, a suffragan of Treves, and by an unknown writer, who, from his mention of conversations which he held with the Emperor on astronomical subjects (c. 58), is styled the Astronomer. Both are in Pertz, ii., in Bouquet, vi., and in the 'Patrologia,' civ., cvi. The name Ludwig or Louis is the same with Chiodowig, the harsh aspirate having been first softened,

b

and then omitted. In like manner Chlotachar became Lothair. Sismondi, ii. 442. b Einhard, Vita Kar. 30; Thegan, 6; Astron. 20; Funck's "Ludwig der Fromme,' 41-5, Frankf. a. M. 1832.

See Fleury, xlvi. 7; Gibbon, iv. 507; Luden, v. 227.

d Thegan, 8. Charlemagne was beatified by the antipope Paschal III., in 1165, at the instance of the emperor Frederick I. Altars are dedicated to him at Aix

Louis, at the time of his accession to the empire, was thirty-six years of age. In his infancy, he had been crowned by Pope Adrian as king of his native province, Aquitaine. He had for many years governed that country, and had earned a high character for the justice and the ability of his administration. He was brave, learned, and accomplished; kindhearted, gentle, and deeply religious. But when from a subordinate royalty he was raised to the head of the empire, defects before unobserved began to appear in his character. His piety was largely tinctured with superstition; he had already thought it his duty to abjure the study of classic literature for such as was purely religious, and, but for his father's prohibition, he would have become a monk like his great-uncle Carloman. He was without resolution or energy, wanting in knowledge of men, and ready to become the victim of intrigues.i

In Aquitaine Louis had been surrounded by a court of his own, and his old advisers continued to retain their authority with him. The chief of these was Benedict of Aniane, whose rigid virtue could not fail to be scandalised by the licentiousness which, after Charlemagne's example, had increased in the imperial household during the last years of the late reign. This Louis at once proceeded to reform by banishing from the court his sisters and their paramours, with other persons of notoriously light reputation.m Nor were the statesmen who had been associated with Charlemagne spared. Among these the most important were three brothers, related to the royal family - Adelhard, Wala, and Bernard." Adelhard had in his youth left the court of Charlemagne in disgust at the divorce of the Lombard queen," and had entered the monastery of Corbie, of which he became abbot. In later years he had acquired a powerful influence over the great emperor; he had been the principal counsellor of his son Pipin, in the government of Italy, and, in conjunction with Wala, he had

la-Chapelle, Frankfort, and Zurich (Böhmer, Reg. Karol. 27). His name is not in the Roman calendar, but the local veneration of him is regarded by canonists as legalised, inasmuch as the sentence of the antipope has not been disallowed by any legitimate pope. (Baron. 814. 63; Butler's Lives of the Saints, Jan. 28; Pagi, xix. 271; Patrol. xcviii. 1357). Some churches, however, as that of Metz, still have (or had in the last century) a yearly office for the repose of his soul (Fleury, xlvi. 9.)

Easter, 781; Astron. 4; Funck, 7.