m tells us that the most active were some of servile or barbaric birth, and, above all "shameless and most cruel," the emperor's fosterbrother, Ebbo of Rheims, who had turned against him at the Field of Lies; and, as their solicitations were in vain, they resolved to proceed by other means. In an indictment of eight heads, drawn up with much iteration, and partly relating to offences for which he had already done penance at Attigny, he was charged with acts of violence towards his kinsmen-the death of Bernard, the tonsuring of Drogo and his brothers; with frequent breach of oaths, especially as to the partition of the empire; with having violated the rest of holy seasons by military expeditions and by holding courts or diets; with outrages and injustice against many of his subjects; with having caused waste of life, and an infinite amount of misery, through the calamities of war. The bishops assumed the right of judging the emperor. They condemned him in his absence, declared him to be deprived of earthly power, and, in order to prevent the loss of his soul, they sentenced him to do penance before the relics of St. Medard and St. Sabinian at Soissons. He was strictly guarded in a cell, until the day appointed for the ceremony, when he was led forth, not October. as a sovereign, but as a sinful Christian desirous of showing penitence for his offences. Lothair was present, with a large body of bishops and clergy, and the cathedral was filled by a crowd of spectators." The emperor, clothed in sackcloth, prostrated himself before the altar; he acknowledged that he had been guilty of misgovernment, offensive to God, scandalous to the church, and disastrous to his people; and he professed a wish to do penance, that he might obtain absolution for his misdeeds. The bishops told him that a sincere confession would be followed by forgiveness, and exhorted him that he should not, as on the former occasion, attempt to hide any part of his sin. The list of charges against him was put into his hands; with a profusion of tears he owned himself guilty of all; and he gave up the document, to be placed on the altar as a record of his repentance. He then laid down his sword and his military belt; he was stripped of the secular dress, which he had worn under his sackcloth; and after these acts it was pretended that, according to the ancient canons, he was incapable of returning to the exercise of arms or of sovereign power. Every bishop who had been concerned in the affair drew up a memoir of it, which he gave into the hands of Lothair.P But the projectors of this humiliation were mistaken in their hopes. Compassion for the emperor, and indignation against those who had outraged him under the pretence of religion, were almost universal. His younger sons, Pipin and Louis, took his part, and Lothair, alarmed by the tokens of the general feeling, hastily withdrew from St. Denys, leaving his father at liberty. Friends speedily gathered around Louis; he was advised to resume his military ornaments, but refused to do so unless with the formal sanction of the church. He was therefore solemnly reconciled in the abbey of St. Denys; his belt and sword were restored to him by some of the same bishops who had been concerned in his degradation; it was declared that a penitent who had laid down his belt might resume it on the expiration of his penance; and the popular joy at the emperor's restoration drew encouragement from a sudden change of the weather, which had long been boisterous and ungenial. In February, 835, a council was held at Thionville, where eight archbishops and thirty-three bishops condemned their brethren who had shared in the proceedings at Compiègne and Soissons. Among these delinquents the most noted was Ebbo, a man of servile birth, who had been foster-brother of Louis, and, like other low-born clerks, had been promoted by him with a view of counterbalancing the aristocratic prelates who aimed at independence of the crown. Ebbo was a man of learning, and had laboured as a missionary among the northern tribes; but his behaviour towards his benefactor had been conspicuously ungrateful. His treason had been rewarded by Lothair with a rich abbey, and, when the cause of Louis again became triumphant, he had fled, with all the wealth that he could collect, in the hope of finding a refuge among the Northmen." He was, however, overtaken, and, after having for some time been detained in the monastery of Fulda, he was larem, cum apostolus dicat, nemo militans Deo implicat se sæcularibus negotiis (II Tim. ii. 4)." Decret. Leonis M. c. 24, ap. Dion. Exig. (Patrol. lxvii. 290). Cf. Conc. Tolet. XII. A.D. 681, c. 2. P Acta, ap. Bouquet, v. 246. Agobard's paper is given there, and in his Works, ii. 73. Thegan, 45-8; Astron. 51; Annal. Bertin. A.D. 834; Funck, 143-150. Flodoard, Hist. Rem. ii. 19 (Patrol. cxxxv.); Milman, ii. 261. Ebbo was promoted instead of Giselmar, a man of compelled to ascend the pulpit of a church at Metz, where, in the presence of Louis, and of the assembled bishops, clergy, and laity, he acknowledged that all the late proceedings against the emperor were unjust and sinful. At Thionville, he wrote and subscribed a profession of his own unworthiness; he was deposed from his see, and remained in monastic custody, or in exile, until the death of Louis. Other bishops were gently treated, on confessing their guilt, while Agobard, who did not appear, was condemned for his contumacy.* Lothair was deprived of the imperial title, and was confined to the kingdom of Italy. But Judith afterwards found it expedient to make overtures to him, and a partition-the last of the partitions which attest the difficulties and the weakness of Louis-was made in 839, by which Pipin, the emperor's grandson, was to be excluded from inheriting his father's kingdom of Aquitaine; and, with the exception of Bavaria, which was left to the younger Louis, the whole empire was to be shared between Lothair and Charles.” To the last the unhappy reign of Louis was distracted by the enmities of his sons, who had alike cast away all filial and all brotherly regards. He died on the 20th of June, 840, in an island of the Rhine opposite Ingelheim, when engaged in an expedition against his son Louis of Germany. On his deathbed he received the consolations of religion from his illegitimate brother Drogo, bishop of Metz. His last words, "Out! Out!" were interpreted as an adjuration commanding the evil spirit to depart." During the earlier years of this reign, the fame of Charlemagne continued to invest the empire with dignity in the eyes of foreign nations, and Louis himself carried on successful war in various directions. But the dissensions of the Franks afterwards exposed them to enemies from without. The Northmen, whose first appearances on the coast had filled the mind of Charlemagne with gloomy forebodings, advanced up the Scheld in 820. In 835, they burnt the great trading city of Dorstadt, with its fifty-four churches; and their ravages were felt on the banks of the Loire and elsewhere. To the south, the Saracens were a no less formi x Annal. Bertin. A.D. 835; Clerici Remenses (Patrol. cxvi. 18); Flodoard, ii. 20; Hincmar, i. 324-7; Thegan, 56; Astron. 54. Sismondi, iii. 36. z Astron. (Patrol. civ. 973); Prudentius, A.D. 839 (ib. cxv. 1387); Palgrave, i. 306. Huz, huz, equivalent to the modern German Aus. (Astron. 63-4). Luden (v. 400) supposes the meaning to be Es ist aus, "It is over." Louis the German had, in 874, a vision, in which his father begged him, in Latin, to obtain his release from purgatory. Anual. Fuld. (Pertz, i. 387.) b Funck, 66-9. e Monach. Sangallen. ii. 14. e Palgrave, i. 297. dable foe; in 838 they plundered Marseilles, and carried off its monks and clergy as prisoners. And on the east, the Slavonic nations had taken advantage of the Frankish contests to make inroads on the imperial territory. The dangers which thus threatened the empire on various sides became yet more serious under the successors of Louis. II. Although the decision of the second Nicene council had been established as law in the eastern empire, the conformity to it which was enforced was in many cases insincere. A considerable party among the bishops and clergy was opposed to the worship of images; and in the army, the enthusiasm with which the memory of the martial iconoclastic emperors was cherished was usually accompanied by an attachment to their opinions. Leo V., "the Armenian," who in 813 became emperor by the deposition of Michael Rhangabe, was, by the influence both of his early training and of his military associations, opposed to the worship of images. His enemies speak of him by the name of Chameleon, on account of the insincere and changeable character which they impute to him; but even they allow that he was a man of unusual energy, and of abilities which fitted him to sustain the declining empire. The patriarch Nicephorus-not (it would seem) from suspicion, but merely in compliance with customrequired him on his elevation to subscribe a profession of faith; but Leo desired that the matter should be deferred until after his coronation, and, when the application was then renewed, he refused.m Like other adventurers who rose to the possession of empire (and probably like a far greater number in whom the promise was not fulfilled), Leo had in early life been told that he was destined to become emperor. Hence he derived an inclination to believe in prophecies; and a monk, who, by a rare exception to the feeling of his class, was adverse to the cause of images, now assured him of a long and glorious reign if he would suppress the worship of them, while he threatened him with calamity A.D. 814. Sismondi, iii. 41-2. Schlosser, 405; Neand. vi. 263. h Schlosser, 393. i Auctor Incertus (i. e. an anonymous continuator of Theophanes) in vol. ix. of the Byzantine historians, ed. Paris, p. 439. Vita Nicephori, 30 (Patrol. Gr. c.); Georgius Monachus, de Leone, i. 3. k Cedren. 490. m Const. Porphyrog. i. 17; Vita Niceph. 32-3; Walch, x. 667; Finlay, ii. 134. Auct. Incert. says that he promised to make no innovations as to religion (431). It is said that when the patriarch at the coronation touched the head of Leo, his hands were wounded by the emperor's hair, which felt like thorns or thistles-an awful omen of what was to follow. Const. Porph. i. 18. in case of his acting otherwise." The words produced their effect on Leo; and he was further influenced by a comparison between the prosperous reigns of the iconoclastic emperors and the misfortunes of those who had followed an opposite policy. He resolved to take the Isaurian Leo and his son for his examples; but, before proceeding to action, he wished to assure himself as to the grounds of his cause. He therefore desired Antony, bishop of Sylæum in Pamphylia, John "the Grammarian,” and other ecclesiastics, to abridge for his information the acts of Constantine's iconoclastic synod, and to collect authorities from the fathers against the adoration of images. He then opened the matter to Nicephorus, urging that the disasters of the empire were popularly ascribed to the worship of images-an assertion which ought perhaps to be taken as representing the feeling of the soldiery alone; and he proposed that such as were placed low and within reach should be removed. The patriarch refused his consent; on which the emperor asked him to produce any scriptural warrant in favour of images. Nicephorus replied that the worship of these, like many other unwritten things, was matter of apostolical tradition, and had been taught to the church by the Holy Ghost; that it would be as reasonable to ask for scriptural proof in favour of reverencing the cross or the gospels. And, on being desired to argue the question with Antony and John, or to refute the authorities which they had produced against his views, he declined, on the ground that he must have nothing to do with heretics." Nicephorus and his partisans-clergy, monks, and laity—now held nightly meetings in the cathedral, where they engaged in prayer for the frustration of the emperor's designs, and bound themselves to stand by the cause of images even to the death.* On hearing of these assemblies, Leo in the dead of night sent for the patriarch, and the question was discussed at great length." Nicephorus repeated his declaration as to the unlawfulness of had been accustomed to evade these; but that he asked for a New Testament precept. x. 696. u Auct. Inc. 437; Schlosser, 407. Nicephorus wrote a chronicle which has often been cited in the preceding pages. His Life and remains (which include discourses of great length in favour of images) are in the Patrol. Gr., vol. c. See also vol. i. of the 'Spicilegium Solesmense.' * Auct. Inc. 439; Walch, x. 672-3. |