Chapter 4: THE CHURCH AND THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE, 714-814

THE HERESY OF THE ICONOCLASTS

THE century that opened with the pontificate of St. Gregory closed very gloomily. The Lombards, for all that they were now Catholics, still menaced the security of Rome; the churches of the East were once again tamely acquiescing in the imperial defiance of the Roman supremacy; and if England and Ireland, the new provinces of Christ's kingdom, were thriving vigorously, morality and Christian order in the older church of Gaul were in worse condition even than in the time of St. Gregory. Finally, the new power which, sixty years before, had so dramatically conquered the lands whence Christianity had originally come, was once more moving; and it was capturing the West, now, as easily as it had then captured the East.

Carthage fell to the Mohammedans in 698 and in the next ten years they were masters of the whole of Roman Africa to the Atlantic. The internal quarrels of the aristocracy in Spain, and the assistance of the governor of Ceuta, the Byzantine Empire's last scrap of territory in the West, gave them their chance. They crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (711) in the imperial vessels- 12,000 men in all, of whom but a poor 300 were Arabs. The chief and the army were Moors, Catholics only a few years earlier. The Visigothic army they routed in one decisive battle, and, victorious, spread like a flood over southern Spain. Cordova, Elvira, Merida, Toledo, were occupied in turn. In 718 Saragossa was taken and in 720 the Mohammedans crossed the Pyrenees They took Narbonne, and though, in 721, they failed to take Toulouse the whole of the south-west was soon in their hands. Bordeaux, Nimes, Carcassonne were Mohammedan towns, and even Autun. In these same years other Arab-directed armies pressed with equal success to the conquest of the East. From Persia, a conquest since the first days of the new religion, they now overran Turkestan and central Asia, the valley of the Indus and the Punjab. Armenia and the Caucasus fell to them and, masters of an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Great Wall of China, they laid siege in 717 to Constantinople.

The rulers of what had been the Eastern division of the old Roman Empire, for all that they resisted stoutly, had been for many years powerless against this new force. Heraclius, upon whom the first disasters fell at the moment when he had barely completed his deliverance of the East from Persia, died in despair (642). Constans II (642-668) had the unhappy experience of a monotony of defeat. With his son Constantine IV (668-685) affairs mended somewhat. The new emperor was a more vigorous personality than his father and he held off for five years the boldest venture the Arabs had yet attempted — the siege of Constantinople (673-678), defeating their fleet with terrible losses at Syllaeum, and their armies in Asia Minor. It was Islam's first real check and for twenty years there was peace.

The next emperor, Justinian II, was, alas, a fool, a half-crazed tyrant, thoroughly incompetent. A revolution drove him out and for sixteen years the empire was given over to anarchy. These were the years of the new Arab advance, of the loss to them of Africa and Spain, and of the Arab seige of Constantinople. The capital was threatened, this time, by the Bulgarians, barbarians lately settled between the Danube and the Balkan mountains. Its deliverer was the military commander of the province of Anatolia, Leo the Isaurian. He marched on the capital with his army and was proclaimed emperor as Leo III. He was to reign for twenty-three years (717-740) and in that time to re-establish order and security for centuries yet to come. Leo III is, with his son and successor, Constantine V (740-775), the creator of that Byzantine State which for another five hundred years effectively staved off the ever recurring assaults from the East.

Gradually the Arabs were driven out of Asia Minor, and Constantine V, taking the offensive, recaptured Cyprus and harried Armenia and Syria to the Euphrates. To these two princes, very largely, do we owe it that the nascent civilisation of the Catholic Middle Ages was not stifled by Islam while it was yet painfully learning to breathe. At the same time, they crippled the power which menaced from the west this one civilised Christian State-the half- civilised Bulgarians.

These warrior princes did the State equally valuable service as reformers. The process which, in the previous century, recognising the facts of the case, had consciously worked to make of the Roman Empire of the East, a Greek-speaking, Oriental-mannered State, was pressed forward more and still more vigorously. A new reorganisation of the provinces, a new distribution of powers, a military code, a code of agricultural laws to arrest the development by which the wealthy landowner was growing more and more wealthy and the peasant becoming a slave, and above all a new code of civil law — it is for this reconstruction of the State, as well as for the military genius which ensured that there should be a State to reconstruct, that the Isaurian emperors deserve their high place in the history of civilisation.

They have another, very different, title to fame as the agents of a new religious controversy which rent the empire for sixty years, embittered their relations with the pope, who by this was the sole surviving power in the West that remained loyal to the empire, and which gave to the Church hundreds of new martyrs. This was the celebrated controversy as to the lawfulness of the reverence paid to the images of the saints, a practice which these emperors began to forbid under extreme penalties. A quotation from the classic historian of the empire, Finlay, shows the connection of this apparent aberration with the general policy of the Isaurian emperors and it explains the bitterness with which, from the beginning, they attacked the practice and punished its adherents. " [The period 717-867" /> opens with the efforts by which Leo and the people of the empire saved Roman Law and the Christian religion from the conquering Saracens. It embraces a long and violent struggle between the government and the people, the emperors seeking to increase the central power by annihilating every local franchise, and even the right of private opinion among their subjects. The contest concerning image-worship. . . became the expression of this struggle. Its object was as much to consolidate the supremacy of the imperial authority, as to purify the practice of the Church. The emperors wished to constitute themselves the fountains of ecclesiastical as completely as of civil legislation."122

Images — painted and sculptured representations of persons and mysteries, allegorical scenes, scenes from biblical history, or the liturgy, images even of definite historical personages, of Our Lord, His mother, and the saints, had been used by the Christian churches from at least the first century as testify, not merely the reference to them in the early writers, but the numbers of such primitive images which still survive. It is less easy to be certain that a definite cult was paid, in the period before Constantine's conversion at least, to the actual image for the sake of its subject. With Constantine's conversion there is very definitely a cult of the Cross, and apparently, about the same time, the beginnings of a cult of other images, for already the practice has its critics, and the Council of Elvira in 305-306 definitely forbids the placing of pictures in the churches "lest what is worshipped and adored be painted on the walls."123 A little later, at the other extremity of the Christian world, Eusebius of Cesarea, the father of Church History, is explaining to Constantine's sister that he cannot send her the image of Christ for which she asks since the Scriptures forbid the making of images. He adds that, having recently found one of the faithful with what passed for pictures of Our Lord and St. Paul in her possession, he had confiscated them, lest the practice should spread, and Christians, like the idolaters, should come to think they could carry God round in a picture.

That such reasons should prevail in a time when idolatry had hardly ceased to be the State religion and when it was still fashionable, was only natural. Despite such critics — Eusebius did not lack successors — the use of images spread, however, and by the time of Justinian (527-565) it was generally established in the East at least, and along with it, but more slowly, the practice of paying a reverence to the image itself. Theologians noted carefully the precise import of such reverence. Thus Leontius, Bishop of Neopolis (c. 582-602), explains (in reply to a Jewish gibe that the Christians, too, are idolaters in their veneration of images and the cross) that the reverence is purely relative; the prostrations before them, the kisses lavished upon them, the place of honour given to them in the churches are directed to the personage they represent. The whole apologetic of Catholic practice in the matter appears here so fully developed that fifteen hundred years of further controversy have added nothing to it.

The practice of the Church in the West was, in this as in other matters, somewhat behind the practice in the East. One of the earliest traces of reverence to images of the saints in the West is the reference, in a poem of Fortunatus, written at the latest in 576, to the lamps that burn before the picture of S. . Martin of Tours. Twenty years later than this we have a witness to the custom in no less a personage than St. Gregory. The pope writes to the Bishop of Marseilles who, fearing his people may make an idolatrous use of the statues, had had them broken up. He points out to the bishop that such pictures and images serve as books to the illiterate. Since it is for this purpose, and not for adoration, that the images are placed in the churches, the bishop does wrong in destroying them. Does he set himself against the universal practice of the Church? Does he claim a monopoly of sanctity and wisdom?

St. Gregory, in these texts, can hardly be claimed as urging the use of images for devotional purposes.124 Still less can he be said to oppose it, or condemn it. The practice continued to spread in the West, and within a century from the death of St. Gregory it was as general there as in the East. The criticism from outside the Church did not cease. Besides the Jews there were the Manichees of the type known as Paulicians. They refused to reverence the Cross because they regarded with horror all that it represented. The Monophysites, too, opposed the use, and even the making, of sacred images. Severus, Peter the Fuller, and other leaders of the party have all gone down to history as strenuous opponents of the practice. To make an image of Jesus Christ was to imply that He had a true human nature and since many of the Monophysites believed Him to be only partly human their objection to the picture or statue is understandable.

It is not easy to say exactly why the emperor Leo III suddenly showed himself in the role of iconoclast. It may have been associations of his youth, for he came from a province not far from the centre of the Paulician movement. It may have been from Monophysite associations, for again he came from a region where the sect had been strong and persecuted. Or again his opposition may be taken as an example of the anti-Hellenist side of that revival of the East which, in progress now for two hundred years, was about to reach its climax, the century of Mohammedan culture's apogee, of Asiatic emperors and Oriental popes. The cult of the beauty of the human form was one element of the domination of Hellenism to which not all the centuries had ever really converted the East. Now, in a variety of ways, the reaction against that cult was showing itself. One of its fruits, perhaps, was the revolutionary religious policy of Leo III.

There was nothing to shock or surprise contemporary opinion in the circumstance that the emperor should occupy himself with reform in religious matters. These were, and had been, his acknowledged province — so far as the mass of the Eastern bishops were concerned — almost from the days of Constantine himself.125 The semi-divine emperor of the pagan empire had never so abdicated his prerogative as to be no more than one of the faithful in the body of the Church. Gradually, in all that concerned its administration, he had come to be its head. He patronised orthodox or heretic as he chose, and whom he patronised prospered. He never, of course, pretended to exercise spiritual powers, to give sacraments for example, nor, if he were a Catholic, did he claim to alter the faith. On the other hand he certainly claimed the right to decide the expediency of issuing condemnations of heresy, and to choose the method of condemnation. He never denied the Church's infallibility, but he expected to control the movement of its exercise. He named the bishops of his empire, and when they crossed his path, as to their credit they frequently did, he deposed and exiled them without scruple. When Justinian came to give the imperial law its classic recasting, the Church law went into his code en bloc. "Nothing should escape the prince, to whom God has confided the care of all mankind," he said. Never did any State lay its hand on the Church so effectively; and when Leo III declared "I am priest no less than emperor," he was little more than a faithful echo to his predecessors.

It was in 726 that the first edict against religious images appeared. The text has long been lost, but apparently it provided for the removal of the images, and the attempt to take down the image of Our Lord which was placed above the gate of the imperial palace, provoked a riot at Constantinople. Throughout the European provinces, in Greece and in Southern Italy, there were similar demonstrations, and even an attempt to dethrone Leo. The Greek insurrection came to an end with the defeat of the pretender's fleet: in Italy the Iconoclasts were less fortunate. In 730 the emperor advanced his policy a step further. He summoned the Patriarch of Constantinople, Germanus I, to sign a decree condemning the veneration of images. Germanus refused, and was promptly deposed and imprisoned. Shortly afterwards he was put to death. A compliant successor was provided and soon the emperor had a substantial following in the very episcopate. The pope, Gregory II (715-731), one of the rare popes of this time who was not an Oriental, now intervened. He had had a long experience of the Byzantine tyranny in ecclesiastical affairs and, in the days when he was still no more than a deacon and the half-mad Justinian II was emperor, he had by his diplomacy extricated the reigning pope — Constantine — from a difficult situation (710).126 Later, as pope, he had been the chief means of preserving the empire's Italian territories for Leo III in the first difficult years of his reign. His letters to Constantinople127 dealing with the new crisis recall bluntly to the emperor the realities of the situation. The empire's hold on the pope is but a name, and he has at hand more powerful protectors, the new Barbarian princes: " If you send troops for the destruction of the images of St. Peter, look to it." The successor of St. Germanus was threatened with deposition unless he amended. This correspondence must have been one of the pope's last activities, for in 731 Gregory II died.

His successor, Gregory III (731-741), took up his policy. Five times at least he wrote to the emperor, begging him to return to the traditional practice, and then, summoning a council at Rome on November 1, 731, the pope condemned and excommunicated whoever condemned the veneration of images or destroyed them. The emperor, for reply, copied his predecessors. As Justinian I had arrested Vigilius in 545 and brought him to the capital, as Constans II in 654 had similarly outraged St. Martin I, as Justinian II had attempted to kidnap Sergius I in 695, and had forced the appearance in 710 of Constantine, so Leo III now sent off a fleet to arrest Gregory III. The fleet was, however, destroyed by storms as it crossed the Adriatic, and the emperor contented himself with the seizure of the papal estates in Sicily and Calabria — the main part of that Patrimonium Sancti Petri from whose revenues the popes financed their administration of Rome and the relief of its poor.

Leo III aroused another adversary, in addition to the pope. This was the great scholar whom we know as St. John Damascene, in whose writings the theological genius of Greek-speaking Catholicism makes its last notable appearance.

To the iconoclast controversy St. John contributed, between 726 and 730, three essays. They defend the lawfulness of making images, and the Catholic practice of paying them honour. To deny them honour because they are material things is Manicheeism. As to the honour paid them it is never more than relative. The varied usefulness of images, as a means of instruction, as reminders of the love of God, and of the virtues of the saints, as stimulating devotion — are all set forth. As to the recent legislation, the saint declares roundly that religious matters are outside the emperor's competence. "It is not for princes to give laws to the Church. . . . The princes' business is the State's political welfare. The state of the Church is a matter for bishops and theologians." Despite St. John's reasoning, and despite the papal decision, Leo III persevered in his policy, and when he died, in 741, the new regime was triumphant in the Asiatic provinces at least, and the Eastern church was once more out of communion with Rome after a peace of fifty years.

The new emperor Constantine V (741-775) was determined to reduce the European provinces as his father had reduced those of Asia Minor. He is the curiously violent and crude figure who has gone down to history as Copronymos — a soubriquet not so impossible to translate as, translated, to print. The accident by which as a baby he soiled the font of his baptism, whence the name derived, was an unconscious foreshadowing of one distorted side of his later life. His accession gave the Iconoclast movement new life. Once the political troubles that followed his father's death were ended Constantine made a bid to capture for the movement the support of the whole Greek episcopate. At a council held at the palace of Hieria (February 10, 753) 338 bishops assented to a declaration that to make images, to honour them, to give them any veneration was sinful. Particularly was this so in the case of images of Our Lord, for such images claimed either to present merely His humanity — separating the natures as Nestorius had done — or, if they claimed more, they confused the two natures. To make images of the saints is, further, a sacrilegious attempt to prolong their earthly life. All images, then, are to be removed from the churches as things contrary to faith and abominable. Whoever contravenes this decree is excommunicated, and, if a priest or bishop, deposed. The emperor would have gone further and denied the belief in the saints' power of intercession, along with the doctrines which were that belief's foundation — the doctrines, that is, of the resurrection of the body and of the eternity of hell and heaven. The bishops, however, held firm and their orthodoxy here prevailed.

The decrees of the council were the beginning of a general war on images and on all who venerated them. They were torn down in church after church and in their place were set, for decoration, landscapes and pictures of animals and birds. From the bishops and the generality of their clergy the emperor met with little opposition. They accepted the decrees without difficulty. But in the monks he met a resistance as determined and as prolonged as the Catholic emperors had met in the matter of Monophysitism. Many were exiled, and then the emperor turned to worse penalties. From 761 when the first monks were martyred to 775, when Constantine died, was a very real reign of terror. The monasteries were forbidden to receive novices, the monks were forcibly married, the cult of the saints was forbidden. It became criminal to pray to them, and the very term " saint " was declared unlawful.

With the death of Constantine V (September 14, 775) the persecution halted, for his son, Leo IV, though himself an Iconoclast, was by no means so violently attached to the movement as his father, who had been one of its creators. Moreover his wife, the Empress Irene, secretly favoured the Catholics. Leo IV's short reign prepared the way for the reaction which followed, for on his death (780) Irene took over the government as regent for his child successor Constantine VI.

The first move towards a restoration of the tradition was the resignation of the Patriarch of Constantinople, as an act of reparation for his former surrender. In his place the Secretary of State, Tarasius, was appointed, who immediately denounced the decision of the Council of 753 and appealed for a general council. The empress agreed and the pope too — one of the great popes of the century, Adrian I (772-795). But the first attempt to hold the council failed. The army, largely recruited from the highlands of Isauria, had always been a centre of the Iconoclast movement and it was still attached to the innovations of the first two great Isaurians. The soldiery, then, drove out the council and threatened a revolution. Irene gave way and bided her time. The mutineers were gradually replaced by troops on whom she could rely and, a year later, on September 24, 787, the council met at Nicea beyond the Bosphorus where, three hundred years earlier, the first of all the general councils had assembled.

More than 300 bishops attended the council, the pope was represented by two legates and the Patriarch of Constantinople presided. There were in all eight sessions, the last of them on October 23, 787, just one month from the first. The Roman legates, as in preceding councils,128 were the bearers of a letter from the pope which set out the traditional belief. The pseudo-council of 753, he lays down, is to be anathematised in the presence of the papal legates since it was held without the Apostolic See and went against tradition. Thus will the words of Our Lord that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" and "Thou art Peter. . . " be fulfilled of that see whose tenure of the primacy shines throughout the world and which is set as head of all the churches of God. The papal letters were read and accepted; and, in successive sessions, with much citation of texts from early writers, it was declared to be part of the Church's faith and practice, that the saints should be invoked in prayer, that images and relics should be received and embraced with honour. The Council of 753, its acts detailed, was condemned; and, in a final decree, the kind of honour due to sacred images was defined-it is an adoration of honour, not the adoration of worship reserved to God as Divine. It is therefore lawful to light lamps before the pictures of the saints or to burn incense before them, since the honour paid to the image is really given to the personage it represents.

The Council of 787 should have ended the controversy for ever. Of the events that led to its reopening, and of the repercussions of the dispute in the distant western kingdom of the Franks we must, however, treat elsewhere.

THE WORK OF ST. BONIFACE

While, on the Eastern frontiers of Christendom, the emperors were enforcing policies that threatened to weaken still further this remnant of the old world and to lose to the Church its last cultured people, a new movement of consolidation was, in the West, laying the foundation on which all the external activity of the Church for the next five hundred years was to be built. This was the alliance between the Papacy and the kingdom of the Franks. The agents of the work were the two Mayors of the Palace, Charles Martel and his son Pepin the Short, the Popes Zachary and Stephen II, the Lombard kings, Liutprand and Aistulf and the English missionary bishop St. Boniface.

Pepin of Heristal, in whom this family emerges as the real ruler of the Franks, died in 714. Charles Martel was one of his natural children — then twenty-six years of age — and, lest he should usurp the heritage, locked away in a fortress by his father's widow. He escaped, however, and, in the customary manner, made away with the heirs, his half-brothers, and seized the position his father had left. He showed himself, from the first, to be a mighty warrior, the greatest soldier Gaul had known since the last of the Roman generals. The Frisians, the Saxons, the Bavarians, the Alemanni — all these hostile nations of the eastern frontier, felt his hand in turn. Aquitaine, Burgundy and the western Frankish kingdom too, he so thoroughly subdued that by the time of his death (741) all Gaul was once again, after three centuries, really united under one ruler.

Another enemy against whom his wars never ceased was Islam. In 732 the Mohammedan armies had penetrated as far as Poitiers. Here Charles met them, and in one of the really decisive battles of world history, he defeated them with tremendous slaughter. In 735 there was a new campaign, the Saracens having seized Arles and Avignon and penetrated even into Burgundy; and in 737 a further campaign in which, again with great slaughter of the defeated, Nimes and other strongholds in the south were restored to Christianity. By the end of his reign, Charles Martel had established himself as the natural political chief of Western Christendom. Against the Arabs he had repeated in the West the success of Leo III in the East; in his own realm he had established a political leadership it had not known for centuries; and, unlike his great Eastern contemporary, he had not been so unfortunate as to involve himself in a quarrel with the Church. So far indeed was he from enmity that he has a place as one of the chief promoters of its missionary activities. "Were it not for the King of the Franks," said St. Boniface, "I could not rule the faithful, nor defend my priests and clerics, the monks and the servants of God. Nor would I be able, without the fear his commands inspire, to hinder the paganism and idolatry of Germany."

The King of the Franks was the mission's protector, but the missionary was the Englishman Boniface, and in him the apostolic Benedictine monachism, to which his own country owed so much, now returned to the continent, in the service of the Roman Church that had first sent it to England, to be now that Church's instrument for the conversion of Germany. St. Boniface — Winfrid was his name until the pope changed it — was born in Devonshire about the year 680. He was of noble birth and he had to fight with his family before he was allowed his heart's desire to become a monk at Exeter. From Exeter he went to Nursling, in Hampshire, and here he came, indirectly, under the influence of St. Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, and Bishop of Sherborne, a gifted, artistic spirit, poet and musician, whose school was, for the west, something of what Jarrow and the school of York were for the north. In all this culture St. Boniface was well versed. He became rector of the abbey school and the author of a Latin grammar. He was a scholar; as the time went, a savant; and he was an ascetic too. In 710 he was ordained priest, and then he began a second siege of authority to consent to his desires — this time to go as a missionary into Germany. Not until 716 did his abbot yield, and in that year Boniface crossed over to Frisia.

Here a one-time monk of Iona had for many years been labouring. This was Willibrord, the founder of the see of Utrecht, to which, in 695, Pope Sergius I had consecrated him, and of the famous abbey of Echternach in what to-day is Luxembourg. Boniface's first essay was not successful and he returned to Nursling. The abbot died, and Boniface had the utmost difficulty in avoiding election as his successor. His heart was still in Germany, and in 718 he set out for Rome. From Rome he returned to Frisia, officially commissioned this time, and for three years he worked with St. Willibrord.

In 722 the pope — Gregory II — recalled him, consecrated him bishop and once more despatched him to Germany, to work this time as the chief of an independent mission. One feature of this consecration has a great significance, for it reveals that desire of immediate control over its subordinates which characterised the policy of the Roman See since the peace of Constantine first set it free to organise its powers. The newly-consecrated bishop swore obedience to the pope in the same terms that the suffragan bishops of the Roman province had used from time immemorial. The consecration was a sign, also, that the new churches of Germany were to be the pope's own personal concern. The pope also gave Boniface letters for Charles Martel, and the Frankish king gave the missionary the sealed letter of safety which was to be, for thirty years, the human means of his protection.

For the next twenty years Boniface moved through Hesse and Thuringia preaching the simplicities of the Gospel, destroying the pagan sanctuaries and everywhere founding monasteries, for women no less than for men. Amoeneburg, Ohrdruff, Fritzlar, Bischoffsheim, Kitzingen, Ochsenfurt, all date from this time. He remained in constant communication with Rome, which the death of his patron Gregory II did not interrupt. The new pope, Gregory III, recalled him in 742 to give him the pallium, and declare him Archbishop, and to commission him to found other sees. In all there were eight of these — Salzburg, Frisingen, Ratisbon, Passau, Buraburg, Erfurt, Wurzburg, and Eichstadt. Two years after his return from Rome he founded the most celebrated of all German abbeys at Fulda. In 753 it was made directly subject to the Roman See — a rare distinction at that time — and ten years later its monks numbered 400. There St. Boniface's body still rests, brought by the pious hands of his disciples after the martyrdom which came to him, in 755, in that Frisia where his missionary career had opened.

St. Boniface is the apostle of Germany, as St. Patrick is of Ireland, and through the co-operation of Frankish king and pope in support of his mission he is, in a way, a co-founder of the alliance between these two powers of western Europe. But his relations with the Frankish king, and with that alliance, were still more intimate. St. Boniface has a double career. He is a reformer in Gaul as truly as he is a founder in Germany.

The religious revival of which the Irish foundation at Luxeuil was the centre had never received any steady support from the Frankish kings. Wherever the monks of St. Columbanus settled, works of piety flourished, morals and Christian life revived, the heathens were converted. But over the great mass of the territory ruled by the Franks the old disorders still went on unchecked, clerical illiteracy and immorality, simony, the brutality of the lay nobles degrading the sees and the monasteries they forcibly appropriated. Despite all the labours of a century of saints, Frankish Catholicism was in as bad a plight at the end of the seventh century as it had been at the beginning.

The accession of Charles Martel made matters worse. The ceaseless effort of defence against Mohammedans in the south and Saxons in the east which filled the twenty-seven years of his reign, entailed a kind of universal conscription in the national life. To the needs of the sovereign everything was ruthlessly subordinated, the Church no less than the rest. Its property, its prestige, its jurisdiction and revenues were chiefly valuable to him as a treasury from which to reward the faithful vassal and to secure the allegiance of the waverer. Men little better than brigands, ancestors of the robber-baron villains of the nursery tale, began to fill the sees. Some could not even read. The luckier among them held several sees at once. Other great sees were left for years without a bishop. How the spiritual life of the Church fared under such prelates, drunkards, murderers, debauchees, can be imagined. Recalling it in years to come, and recalling the man who was so largely responsible, St. Boniface could assure Pepin, Charles Martel's son, that his father was certainly in hell, and Pepin could believe it. Against thirty years of such a regime, crowning as it did a century of steady decline, nothing but occasional, isolated, individual piety was left to survive.

St. Boniface's career in Gaul really begins with the death of the terrible Charles Martel (741). The two sons who succeeded, Pepin the Short and Carloman, had received a monastic education at St. Denis, and it was in the kingdom of Carloman, soon to become a monk himself, that St. Boniface began his new career. As in his pioneer work in Germany, so now as reformer in Gaul, he acted as agent of the Roman Church. Councils were held, the first for nearly a century, in the eastern kingdom in 741 and 744, in Pepin's kingdom at Soissons, also in 744; and, in 745, a general council met of the whole of the Frankish Church. Vacant sees were filled, new sees founded, the grouping of the sees round a metropolitan see restored. Councils were henceforth to meet annually, the metropolitan was to make the visitation of the bishops, the bishops of their clergy. The itinerant clergy were to be suppressed. The laws forbidding the clergy to marry, to carry arms, to hunt, and providing that they should wear the special clerical dress, were renewed. For delinquents appropriate sanctions were provided — spiritual penalties and others too, imprisonment and floggings. In the monasteries the rule of St. Benedict was henceforth of obligation. Other canons dealt with the superstitious rites and survivals of paganism with which the popular Catholicism was interwoven. Sacrifices to trees and streams, the custom of honouring the pagan holy days, magical practices, witchcraft — all these still flourished in places, and these councils provided for their extirpation.

A much less usual matter was the appearance of heretics. One of them, Adalbert, a Frank, gave himself out as a new prophet, to whom angels had brought relics of an invincible efficacy. He had new prayers, filled with mysterious names; forgave sins without confession; gave away his own hair and nails as relics; and in the course of years had gathered an immense following, and had even found two fools of bishops to consecrate him. The other heretic Clement, was an Irishman. His teaching was of a more intellectual kind — a curious eclectic rearrangement of orthodoxy and heresy.

The reform council so earnestly desired by St. Gregory had at last been realised — a hundred and forty years after his death. But the old obstacle to any real reform still survived. Pepin was no less attached to the royal hold on the Church than the Merovingians whom he had displaced. He was willing enough to see the disorders of clerical life corrected, and laws made to improve the quality of Frankish Christianity, but to the canons which, restoring the hierarchy, provided the only safeguard for the future, he turned a deaf ear. So long as he reigned none of the proposed metropolitan organisation passed into practice. Not even St. Boniface himself found recognition as archbishop of a particular see, for all his reception of the pallium from Pope Zachary and his extensive authority as papal legate. For all his sanctity, and the merit of his mighty labours, he was never, for these princes, anything more than the bishop of the frontier never, apparently, a force in their councils, never a political power never personally intimate with any of them. This situation had its advantages, the greatest of which was the possibility of preaching Catholicism to the Saxons as a thing not necessarily associated with their detested Frankish conquerors. The main strength of the English saint lay not in Frankish sovereigns, for all the value of the protection they afforded him, but in his constant, uninterrupted relations with the popes. At every turn he lays before them his plans and his difficulties, and it is the popes who encourage and console him. These three popes — Gregory II, Gregory III, and Zachary — are very truly the sources of the new German church's vitality, as they are, also, of what new life came through Boniface to the Church in Gaul. Zachary died in 752 and the saint survived him a bare three years. Before the martyrdom came which crowned his long life of self-sacrificing exile, political affairs in the Frankish kingdom had taken a new turn. The new pope, Stephen II (752-757), had inaugurated, between the Roman See and the one Catholic power in the West, that alliance which was to be the pivot of papal history for the next five hundred years, and which was to do much, in the immediate future, to change the type of character elected as Bishop of Rome. In that revolution St. Boniface had little more than a place of honour. He was the greatest bishop of the Frankish empire, and the one in closest touch with Rome; but it was others whom Pepin chose as his agents when, in 751, he besought the papal sanction for the coup d'etat he meditated.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PAPAL STATE

It was now more than a century since any of the descendants of Clovis had actually reigned. Since the death of Dagobert (638) the kings had merely succeeded. The power was entirely in the hands of their chief subjects, and since 687 in the hands of the family of Pepin. It was they, the Mayors of the Palace, who ruled, the Merovingian kings only appearing in public once or twice in the course of their reign. So real was the power of the Carolingians that, within half a century, of their first laying hold of it Charles Martel was able to leave the kingship vacant for thirteen years. Pepin, when he succeeded his father, filled it once more, but in 751, flushed with a series of new victories, and, since the retirement of Carloman his brother to an Italian monastery, sole ruler of the Franks like his father before him, he determined to end the anomaly once for all. The Merovingian should be deposed and himself, with the reality of power, have the title also. He set the problem before the pope as a case of conscience. The pope agreed to the abstract case that whoever really ruled should be called king, and Pepin, strong in this ratification, assumed the succession for himself and his family in a general assembly of the nation. The last of the Merovingians was tonsured, with his son, and Pepin was consecrated king by St. Boniface.

This consecration, a solemn anointing with holy oil, already in use among the Visigoths and the Anglo-Saxons,129 was a novelty in Gaul. It gave the new monarchy, from the beginning, something of a sacred character; and in the eyes of the new kings also, it may be, warranted that control in Church matters which they took over from the Merovingians and which they were to develop very strikingly in the next hundred years until it reached to the nomination of the popes themselves. Three years later the anointing was repeated with even greater solemnity. This time, in 754, it was the pope himself who conferred it, and on Pepin's sons as well — Carloman and the future Charlemagne — announcing, "It is the Lord who through our lowliness consecrates you as king."

It was not merely to ratify the act of Boniface that, in 753, Stephen II had made the long journey from Rome to Quierzy. Between the first and second consecrations of Pepin a revolution in Italy had altered the whole temporal status of the papacy, and in that revolution the Frankish king's action had been the decisive factor. It has already been noted how, in the time of St. Gregory the Great, the Roman popes found themselves faced with the insoluble problem of being the loyal subjects of an emperor who would not come to terms with the Lombard invaders and who yet could not defeat them. As the seventh century wore on this problem grew even more acute. The Lombards increased their conquests until — outside Calabria — Aquileia, Venice, Rome, Naples, and their neighbouring countrysides were all that was left of Justinian's Italy. The Lombards, meanwhile, had abandoned their Arianism; they were now devout Catholics. The emperors, on the other hand, were the leaders and chief promoters of new heresies, of Monothelism in the seventh century, of Iconoclasm in the eighth. They showed themselves as ready to tyrannise in matters of religion, as willing to harry and even to murder the popes, as they were incompetent to defend their inheritance against the Lombards. Their representative at Ravenna lost his hold on all except the actual territory round that city; and while the duchies of Naples and Venice tended to become autonomous, the duchy of Rome, thanks to the popes, not only remained loyal but, more than once, helped by the circumstance that it was papal territory no less than imperial, it came to the assistance of the beleaguered exarch in Ravenna. It was a curious situation when the pope, whose properties the emperor had confiscated, whose arrest he had ordered, and against whom he had fitted out a great fleet, was the solitary defence in Italy of the emperor's representative.

But during the reigns of the popes who were the patrons of St. Boniface — Gregory II, Gregory III and Zachary — events occurred that brought this anomaly to an end. The Lombard chiefs were, by this time (c. 715), three in number; there was the king of the Lombards, whose capital was Pavia; there were the two dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, nominally his subjects, but actually more than half independent. The king contemporary with these three popes was Liutprand (712-744), the greatest of all the Lombard kings and, as events were to show, an excellent Catholic.

It was the new religious policy of the Emperor Leo III that occasioned the beginnings of change. When Gregory II denounced the imperial laws that forbade the veneration of images and banished them from the churches, the creaking imperial machinery was set in motion to reduce him to submission, as it had been set in motion against his predecessors, Sergius I in 695 and St. Martin I in 654. As in 695, the Roman people and the Roman division of the imperial army stood by the pope. The Lombards too joined with them, and it was their army that halted the exarch as he marched from Ravenna to execute the imperial will against St. Gregory. The exarch retreated to his capital, his troops mutinied and in the riot he lost his life. His successor preferred the ways of negotiation and, as a preliminary to reducing the pope, was bidden to break the new, unheard-of, papal alliance with the Lombards. The involved diplomacy, in which the mutual rivalry of the Lombard king and dukes played its part, ended curiously enough in a three- cornered pact between pope, exarch, and the Lombard king. This was in 730. The next year Gregory II died.

His successor Gregory III, a Syrian, was just as resolute in his opposition to the Iconoclast emperor and in his defence of Leo's victims. The emperor confiscated the papal estates in Sicily and southern Italy. He cut the communications between the pope and the bishops of these provinces. But against the pope himself he was powerless, thanks to the growing autonomy of the duchies now separated from Ravenna by intervening Lombard territories, and thanks to the Lombard reduction of the exarch's power. The ten years of Gregory III's rule (731-741) were years of Lombard conquest, and the Romans were sufficiently ill-advised to assist the Duke of Spoleto against the king, and so to give Liutprand every excuse he needed to capture Rome itself. Rome the king did not indeed attack, but he had captured four towns in the north of the duchy when Gregory III died. The next pope, Zachary — yet another oriental — was more diplomatic. As Liutprand marched on Rome the papal policy changed. The cause of the rebel Duke of Spoleto was abandoned. The king promised to evacuate the Roman territory, and to restore the captured towns; and the Roman army joined with his to attack Spoleto. Two years later it was the turn of Ravenna to feel the weight of the Lombard power. Liutprand, master of Bologna, and of Cesena, had Ravenna in his hands when Zachary besought him to spare it. Once more the papal diplomacy, because it was papal, was successful.

In the following year (744) Liutprand died. The new king, Ratchis, was equally warlike, and equally docile to the voice of St. Peter. As Liutprand had abandoned his campaign against Ravenna, so Ratchis now gave up the siege of Perugia. He did more, for in 749 he abdicated, and buried himself in the monastery of Monte Cassino — an ill event for the fortunes of the imperial rule. Aistulf who succeeded him was of quite another stamp. Before Pope Zachary died (March, 752) Aistulf had taken Ravenna and its duchy, bringing the imperial rule to an end once and for all. He then turned to the towns that lay between his new territories and Rome — Perugia, Todi, Amelia — and to the conquest of Rome itself. The new pope, Stephen II (752-757), set himself to negotiate, and secured a peace of forty years. That was in June, 752. By the autumn the treaty was in pieces, and Aistulf demanding tribute from the Romans as the price of his "protection." Once more the pope negotiated, but this time in vain-Aistulf was inflexible. The papal ambassadors were both of them his own subjects, and the king sent them back to their respective monasteries.

The winter passed with the Romans anxiously awaiting the descent of Aistulf's army with the first good days of spring From the emperor — Constantine V — all that came was an order to the pope to negotiate with Aistulf for the restoration of Ravenna. The Romans evidently must save themselves; the pope must somehow defeat the Lombards — and he had no resources-or become their subject, losing the de facto independence he had enjoyed for half a century, and submitting to a barbarian master: unless he could find an ally who would deal effectively with the Lombards and disinterestedly with himself. The pope turned to the Franks, with whose princes, very largely because of St. Boniface, the papacy had been in close relation for thirty years and more.

That the Franks should be called in to defend Rome against the Lombards was in keeping with Roman political tradition. Its last appearance had been so recently as the time of Pope Stephen's own predecessor Gregory III, who had made a great appeal to Charles Martel in 739, but fruitlessly. The Frank was then the ally of Liutprand, and saw no good reason why he should make war on his friend to restore Byzantinism at Rome. Thirteen years later the situation was very different. Byzantinism was dead, in Rome and even in Ravenna. Nor was the pope appealing now for its restoration. It was protection for St. Peter himself, his shrine, his people, his city that was the motive of the appeal. Charles Martel, too, was dead. In his place the pious Pepin reigned, and as recently as a matter of months ago Pepin had sought, and obtained, from St. Peter that ratification which consecrated as a religious act the coup d'etat by which he and his family had succeeded to the heritage of Clovis.

The pope approached Pepin with the utmost secrecy, using a pilgrim as his agent. Pepin, in return, sent to Rome the Abbot of Jumieges. The reply which the abbot carried back to France was to the effect that the pope wished to treat personally of the important matter and besought Pepin to provide a suitable escort for his protection. Pepin agreed, and in the September of 753 the escort arrived in Rome.

It found the pope prepared for his momentous journey, and it found with him yet another ambassador from the emperor. In the very hour when the pope, determined to end at last the dangerous futility of his nominal dependence on Constantinople, was setting out to meet his new protector, Byzantinism had again intervened. The pope was ordered to seek out Aistulf and to induce him to restore Ravenna to the empire.

It was then a curiously mixed caravan, where the last of one age and the first of another met, that set out from Rome on October 14, 753, the pope, the imperial ambassador, the Franks. At Pavia they met the Lombard king. The pope made his appeal, the imperial ambassador supplemented it with his own eloquence and a letter from Constantine V. Aistulf, of course, remained unmoved. Whereupon the convoy split up. The Greeks returned to Constantinople; the pope, despite Aistulf's efforts to detain him, made his way to Aosta and the pass of the St. Bernard. At St. Moritz envoys from Pepin met him; at Langres, Pepin's son, the future Charlemagne. By the feast of the Epiphany 754 the pope had reached the royal palace at Ponthieu. Pepin with his court had gone out to meet him, had prostrated himself before the pope and in the procession walked beside him holding his stirrup.

The next day the fateful interview took place. The pope and his court appeared before the Frankish king clad in sackcloth, ashes on their heads. They besought him to bring about a peaceful settlement of the cause of St. Peter and of the Roman State. Pepin consented, and pledged himself to restore the exarchate with all its rights and territories. Negotiations with Aistulf were opened forthwith. Pepin began by demanding a pledge that the Lombards, out of reverence for St. Peter and St. Paul, would for the future abstain from all hostilities against their city. Aistulf refused, and in two great assemblies of the Franks (at Braisne on March 1 and at Kiersy-sur-Oise on April 14, 754) it was agreed-not without opposition — that the Lombards should be compelled by force of arms. Pepin marched his army across the Alps and laid siege to Pavia. Aistulf consented to treat. He agreed to surrender Ravenna and his other conquests and even Narni, a Roman town taken years before by Liutprand. In October, 754, the pope returned to Rome.

Aistulf made over Narni to Pepin's representatives, and waited until Pepin and his army were safely over the Alps. Then he went back on his word. He refused to complete the surrender, and returned to the war of raid and pillage against Rome which had driven Pope Stephen to call in the Franks. On January 1, 756, he laid siege to Rome itself. The pope had already urged Pepin to return and complete the work of his first campaign. Now he managed to send a further embassy from the beleaguered city. The envoys took with them, among other letters, one addressed to the whole Frankish nation, written in the name of St. Peter, "I, Peter the Apostle."

Pepin did not delay. As the Frankish army moved south Aistulf abandoned the siege of Rome and marched to meet it. He was defeated and locked himself up in Pavia. Pepin followed and as he prepared to lay siege to the town, once more the ghost of Byzantine Italy appeared. The same high official from Constantinople who had accompanied the pope in the mission of 753 now returned, to demand, of Pepin this time, that the disputed territories should, when he had reconquered them, be made over to the imperial government. Pepin refused. He had gone to war, he explained, for love of St. Peter, hoping by delivering the apostle to win pardon for his sins. The ambassador retired, this time finally. It was the old empire's definitive abandonment of its claim to the city whence it had sprung. Rome was to begin its history anew, independent of the empire which still continued to bear its name.

The holy war continued. Aistulf was once more compelled to plead. This time the terms were more severe, and Pepin installed an army of occupation until they had been executed. Frankish officials went from town to town receiving the surrenders and the keys of the gates and then, making their way to Rome, they laid the collection before the tomb of the apostle. The pope was now, through the Frankish king's devotion to St. Peter, independent of any temporal ruler, was himself ruler, in name as in fact, of the city and State in which his see was fixed. A new and immense complication was thereby added to the development of Catholicism in the lands once ruled by the Roman Emperor of the West.

THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PAPAL STATE

The history of the next twenty years showed how seriously the complication of the Papacy's new political importance could distract the popes from the task of their spiritual rulership. It showed, also, that if they had escaped subjection to the barbarian Lombards, they had by no means escaped the need to fight for their independence. Finally it introduced a new element into the ecclesiastical life of the greatest of sees. Worldly-minded clerics, ambitious for honours, had always been a possible source of trouble at Rome. Now that the Bishop of Rome was in every sense a sovereign prince, there was added the new danger that the office would be coveted by men who were not clerics at all. To the semi- brigand nobility of the little Papal State there was offered — at the risk of a riot, a few murders, and the as yet but faintly possible intervention of the distant Franks — a prize that might from the mere lordship of some petty rock-fortress, transform them into kings. That temptation endured, to be for the next three centuries a constant factor in papal history.

The temptation was nourished by the new hostility between the two bodies who made up the notabilities of the new State — the clergy and the military aristocracy. In the last years of Byzantine rule the clergy, through their head the pope, had supplied the brains, and even the more material means, by which the Lombards had been warded off. Now they were in every sense rulers, and the military nobles — no longer, even nominally, their fellow-subjects under the distant emperor — were simply the officers and chiefs of the clergy's army. Had clergy and nobility alike been guided by nothing except the ideals of the religion they professed, humility, obedience, a passion for serving, the situation would have presented no danger. As it was, the new State, and eventually the Papacy itself, became a stage where presently a half- regenerate humanity strove and struggled in all its primitive unpleasantness.

There was, from the very beginning, in the very pope in whom the State was founded, Stephen II, the tendency and the desire to end, once and for all, the external menace to papal independence by making the pope master of all Italy. The event showed that neither he nor his successor, his brother Paul (756-767), whom the same ambition drove, was strong enough to achieve it. It was evident that the new State could not even survive, unless protected by the Frankish power that had created it. The Lombard without, and the lay nobility within, were more than these first papal kings could cope with. Hence a continual appeal to the Franks, and finally a war in which, just twenty years after the first intervention of Pepin, Charlemagne, Pepin's son, destroyed the Lombard power for ever and made himself King of Lombardy. This victory made St. Peter's protector the near neighbour of St. Peter's successor, and the protector tended, by reason of the frequent appeals for his intervention, to become something of an adviser, of a judge, of a suzerain even. The problem that drove the popes to ally themselves with the Franks had by no means been solved: it had merely changed its form. In one form or another it continued to worry the popes through the next twelve hundred years, to 1870 and to 1929; it is a problem they can never neglect, and their preoccupation with it is bound, not infrequently, to distract their attention from more directly spiritual affairs.

The history of the Papal State between its foundation and Charlemagne's conquest of Lombardy (754-774) can be told very briefly. It is in miniature what, from one aspect, Papal History will tend to be for the next thousand years. Aistulf, in 756, had pledged himself to restore what he himself had captured. The spoil of earlier wars, Bologna, for example, Osimo, was left untouched by the settlement of that year. Aistulf's death, and the appearance of rivals to dispute the succession, one of them seeking aid at Rome, seemed an obvious occasion for the pope to extend his territory (757). A treaty was signed; the pope did his part; the candidate he favoured succeeded; and he made over something, but only something, of the extensive restoration he had promised.

Pope Stephen had died before he learnt how the Lombard had deceived him. It was left to his successor, Paul, to avenge it. The negotiations now opened with Pepin were complicated by the fact that the pope had lately intervened to secure Pepin's patronage for the Dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, who were the Lombard king's subjects. Pepin was far from enthusiastic. He refused the pope's offer of the protectorate and he refused also to support the pope's plans of territorial expansion. Whereupon the Lombard king marched against his rebellious dukes, overcame them, and then turned to Rome. Pope Paul demanded the fulfilment of the promises made before his accession. The king promised a part, conditionally on the pope's securing from Pepin the return of the hostages taken in 754. Paul promised this and wrote to Pepin as the king desired. He also sent another letter, to explain that the first was mere formality. Would Pepin send an army and compel the Lombard to fulfil to the letter his first promises? Pepin sent, not an army, but two commissaries; the disputes were settled by a confirmation of existing arrangements, and the pope was advised to cultivate the friendship of the Lombard king.

This was all the more advisable in that the emperor, Constantine V, powerless to punish the pope directly for his share in the events that had made him politically free of the empire, master of Rome, and, what mattered more at Constantinople, of Ravenna too — was now endeavouring to build up with the Lombard an anti-papal alliance. Nor was this the end of Byzantine diplomacy. It crossed the Alps and, on the basis of a common feeling in the matter of the devotional use of images, sought to draw Pepin, too, into an anti-papal combination. But Pepin refused; as he also refused to be moved, by the pope, from his friendly relations with the Lombards. So things remained for the rest of the pontificate of Paul r. He died in 767 (June 28) and his death was the occasion for the domestic dissensions in the new State to reveal themselves in all their vigour.

Paul I, thanks to Pepin, had enjoyed peace abroad; and, thanks to his own firm, not to say harsh, government, peace at home also. The dispossessed military aristocracy had in this pope a master whom they feared. The prisons were never empty; death sentences were by no means unknown; taxes were heavy. It only required the news of the pope's illness to set in motion a whole world of discontent. The nobles saw their chance to regain what they had lost. They did not propose to restore the emperor, nor dared they have planned to laicize the State. Pepin, St. Peter's protector, was still very much alive. It was simpler to force one of themselves upon the Church as Paul's successor. The leader in the conspiracy was the duke Toto, the pope-to-be was the duke's brother Constantine, a layman like himself. The conspirators first tried to make sure that the pope would not recover and then, foiled in this, called in their retainers. By the time the pope died (June 28) the nobles held the city. They found their way into the Lateran and there proclaimed Constantine, who, in the course of the next few days, received in rapid succession the tonsure, minor and major orders, and consecration as Bishop of Rome.

All had gone according to plan. The opposition was mute save for one man. This was the primicerius Christopher. He had been the power behind the throne in the late reign, and in the reign of Stephen too. He it was, apparently, who had planned and carried through the diplomatic strategy which had established the papal State. More recently, he had foiled Toto's attempt to hasten the death of Paul I; and, on Toto's army entering the city, he had brought that warrior to promise solemnly not to interfere with the election. Now he refused to acknowledge Toto's tool and realising himself to be marked for destruction — one of his supporters, the duke Gregory, had already been murdered — he soon fled, with his children, to St. Peter's. There he remained until Constantine promised to spare their lives. In return they pledged themselves to enter a monastery by Easter, 768, and until then to remain quiet. Easter came, they chose their monastery-at Rieti, in the duchy of Spoleto — and were set free. But once safely across the frontier it was to the Lombard king that they made their way. He was only too happy to use the opportunity; and presently (July, 768) the exiles were at the gates of Rome with a Lombard army in support. Friends within opened the gates and, after two centuries of vain effort, the Lombards were at last in possession of the city of St. Gregory. In the fight Toto was slain, stabbed from behind, and Constantine fled, to be discovered skulking in a corner of the Lateran.

Christopher himself had not yet arrived. In his absence the Lombard priest, Wildepest, who led the expedition, held an election and proclaimed as pope an aged priest, Philip. The feast that crowned the election was barely over, and the elect not yet consecrated, when, that same day (July 1), Christopher returned. Philip's election was quashed, and he was taken to his monastery by the hero who had murdered Toto. The following day an election took place in the customary form, Christopher presiding. The choice of the assembly clergy, nobles and people — fell upon Stephen, a priest of holy life who, from Christopher's point of view, had the further advantage that he was weak in character and utterly without experience of affairs. It only remained to punish, or to wreak vengeance on, the survivors of the election of 767 — Constantine and his fellow-prisoners. Their eyes were poked out and they were thrust into prison, Constantine after a trial and sentence of deprivation. Along with these unfortunates, Wildepest, guilty of the election of Philip, was likewise blinded, and so roughly was the operation performed in his case that he died of it.

Pepin had died this same year (768) and it was to his successors, Charlemagne and Carloman, that Stephen III's envoys brought the news of the events which had resulted in his election. The envoys asked for a deputation of bishops to assist at a coming council where measures would be taken to guard against any repetition of the scandal of Constantine's election. Thirteen prelates were chosen, and at Easter, 769, the council opened in the Lateran. Constantine was cited, and the poor blind wretch, bidden defend himself, was treated with insults and blows and sentenced to life imprisonment in a monastery. The new pope and his electors then, on their knees, besought the pardon of the council for having during twelve months acknowledged Constantine as pope. Next, a witness to the growing barbarism of thought no less than of manners, all Constantine's ordinations were declared invalid — a decree that went back on the teaching traditional at Rome since the beginning of things, and that repudiated the principle in whose name the pope of a bygone time had threatened to depose St. Cyprian. Finally it was enacted that, for the future, only cardinal-priests or cardinal-deacons should be eligible as candidates for the papacy, and that in the election none but clerics should take part. The laity's share was reduced to the opportunity of cheering the newly-elected pope and of signing the acta of the election in testimony of agreement.

Stephen III survived the council of 769 barely three years. He continued to rule as weakly as he had begun, and the only event of importance was the disgrace and the murder of the men who had made him pope, Christopher and his son Sergius. The pope, in fact, tired of his creators; and he found an ally in the Lombard king, offended mortally by Christopher's rejection in 768 of his candidate Philip, and by the. murder of Wildepest. In 771 the Lombard marched on Rome. It was Lent and he came on his soul's business. But Christopher filled the town with troops and locked the gates against him. The pope, however, went out to St. Peter's to meet the king, and Christopher and Sergius received orders to follow. Their supporters, seeing the tide begin to turn, forced them out and left them to the Lombards. They were dragged from the tomb of the Apostle and, at the bridge of St. Angelo, had their eyes torn out. Christopher died. Sergius, less lucky, survived for a year in the prisons of the Lateran and then, half strangled, was buried alive close by. Nor did the Lombard king keep his promises to the pope.

This tale of petty insurrection, treachery, outrage and murder is worth some detail in its recital, not only because it witnesses very graphically to the general advance of barbarism within Christianity since the days of St. Gregory and St. Leo, but because it marks the beginning of barbarism's conquest of their very see.

CHARLEMAGNE, 768-814

Stephen III's short reign (768-772) ran out in shame and ignominy. The very worst might have been anticipated of the election which followed his death. That election, however, had a far different result. It set on the throne one of the most capable popes the Church had known since St. Gregory the Great. This was Adrian I. By birth he came of the military aristocracy; by all his life and training he was a cleric; at the moment one of the seven deacons. He was experienced, capable, honest, and in this Roman there re- appeared all the native genius for government and administration. He was to rule for twenty-three years, a length of days not equalled for another thousand years.130 His first act was to enquire into the scandals which had disgraced the last years of his predecessor, and to mete out appropriate punishment to the guilty. Next he turned to the Lombard king who, with his vassal of Spoleto, was harrying the papal State as of old. Negotiations had little effect, and the new pope appealed yet once again to the Franks. Meanwhile the Lombards marched on Rome. The Franks followed their usual policy. They strove to reconcile the Lombards with the pope, to induce them to abandon their conquests — but in vain; and in the early summer of 773, led by their new king, Charles, the Franks invaded the Lombard kingdom. The usual rout followed, but this time the Frankish victory was definitive. The Lombard king was despatched to France, where he remained to the end of his life; the King of the Franks was, henceforth, King of the Lombards too.

While the siege of the Lombard capital, Pavia, was still in progress Charles (Easter, 774) made a solemn visit to Rome. He was received with the honours traditionally used for the emperor's representative, and he renewed with Adrian the pact sworn twenty years before between his father and Stephen II. According to this agreement Spoleto, Benevento, Tuscany, Venetia, Istria and Corsica were also promised to the pope. Had it ever been carried out, the popes would have been rulers of the greater part of central and northern Italy; the Lombard kingdom would have shrunk to a mere province. Commachio, Ferrara, Faenza, and Bologna were indeed made over once Pavia had fallen, but before the magnificent promise had been further fulfilled Charlemagne's consciousness of his new role of King of the Lombards intervened. He turned a deaf ear now to the discreet papal reminders and when, in 780, he had his son, Pepin, consecrated by the pope as King of Italy, the act was a clear declaration that the Frankish kingdom of Lombardy would remain in extent pretty much what the Lombard kingdom had been. The prospect of territorial magnificence which had haunted the popes for thirty years was at an end. Occasional and important additions Charles did indeed make to the papal States, but from 780 the convention of 754 and 774 was a dead letter.

To the burden of this quite legitimate grievance, events soon added another, for Pope Adrian and his successors. This was the relation of their new State to the power which created it for them.

In the time of Pepin (754-768) the papal State had been certainly free from any Frankish interference, and of the title Patrician of the Romans, with which the grateful pope had decorated him, Pepin made no use at all. Nor did Charlemagne act differently until, after the victory of 774, he began to have permanent personal interests in Italy. Then, slowly, there began to gather round the distinction certain concrete attributes of lordship. The nobles whom, for one reason or another, the papal government deprived of rank or office, began to appeal against the pope to the Frankish king and, despite protests from Rome, the king listened to the appeals; occasionally he made recommendations thereupon to the pope. Adrian was a wise ruler, as tactful as he was strong, and in his time, for all that this new practice began slowly to establish itself, he so managed things that the papal independence did not suffer and that, on the other hand, the Frankish king remained a friend. Adrian died, however, in 795 and under his successor Leo III — a very different type of personage indeed — the difficulties began to show immediately.

It was a first innovation that the new pope officially notified the King of the Franks of his election, sending him, along with the keys of St. Peter's shrine, the standard of the city, and praying for a deputation of nobles to receive the Romans' oath of fidelity. Much had happened, evidently, since the last election twenty-three years before, to develop Charlemagne's importance in Roman affairs in the eyes of the Roman Church. Charles, too, has a share in the loyalty of the Romans, since they now swear an oath to him, and he has therefore a very definite — if not well defined — right of government. Pope and king, in some way, are together the rulers of Rome. And in his letters to the pope the king recommended him to lead a good life, to govern wisely, to put down abuses, to show himself a good pope and ruler.

Four years later (799) an attempted revolution in Rome showed how far Charles' overlordship was admitted in practice. Leo III, for good or bad, was as unpopular as Paul I had been thirty years earlier. He was not himself a noble, and it was from the family of his predecessor that the leaders of the trouble came. Trouble of a very grave kind was already preparing in 798, and it came to a head in an attempt to murder the pope on St. Mark's Day, 799. He was set upon as he made his way to the stational church for the litanies, beaten, his eyes half torn out and his tongue as well, and he was carried off to a monastery in one of the less frequented districts of the city. Thence he was rescued, and recovering, miraculously it is said, from his injuries, fled to the Frankish court. He found Charles at Paderborn and besought his protection.

From Paderborn towards the close of the year (November, 799) he returned, with a strong escort of nobles and bishops charged by the king to enquire into the business. The conspirators had no other resource than to try to turn the enquiry into a trial of the pope. The details of the proceedings are lost, but no definite findings were published and the matter dragged on until Charlemagne himself arrived in Rome a year later. On December 1, 800, there was a great assembly in St. Peter's. The king presided and spoke of his desire to end the scandal. Accusations had been made which no one could prove, and since the pope could not be tried he could not be acquitted. It was the dilemma of 501 all over again131 and Leo III took the same way out of it that Symmachus had chosen. He made a solemn declaration, on oath, that he was innocent, in a second assembly called for the purpose on December 23. It was perhaps hardly a satisfactory conclusion to the affair and the circumstances of the king's presence gave it quite possibly the appearance of being done at the bidding of the all powerful lord of the Western world. For that, by this time, Charles indeed was.

Two days later was Christmas Day, and as the king knelt before the shrine of the Apostle at mass, the pope placed a crown on his head while the choir acclaimed him emperor of the Romans. The deed had been done which was to haunt the imagination of the next five hundred years; the pope, so it came to be considered, had made the King of the Franks into the Roman Emperor. This it was — whatever the realities which, in the mind of Leo III and Charlemagne, underlay that astonishing gesture — which never left the popular imagination, the pope creating the new power and bestowing it upon the Frankish kings, the all powerful king kneeling before the pope to receive it. That Charles was not well pleased at the manner in which there came to him whatever the ceremony was meant to convey, that he had already had it in mind to acquire it through marriage with the Empress Irene-in whom, at the moment, the line of Augustus and Constantine and Justinian was represented — may well be. What was done was done and, from the very lack of definition in the doing, it acquired all the more easily the name of being what it appeared to be. Two questions suggest themselves. Whom was it that the pope crowned, and what affect had the ceremony on the relations between the Frankish kings and the papal monarchy which, already, were developing so rapidly in the direction of patronage and subordination.

Charlemagne was the greatest figure the West had seen since Julius Caesar himself. He is of the line of Alexander and Napoleon, and the memory of what he was and what he achieved never faded from the memory of the Middle Ages, but remained to be always, in some respects, its most powerful inspiration. He was, to begin with, the mightiest warrior of his warlike family. He completed his father's work in Aquitaine; and, beyond the Pyrenees, after years of fighting, made himself master of Spain as far as the Ebro. In Italy, to his conquests of 774 he added those of the southernmost Lombard duchy of Benevento and for a time Venice and Dalmatia too acknowledged his suzerainty. His most permanent work was, however, in Germany. Bavaria now lost its semi-independent status, and after several failures he finally penetrated into the heart of Hungary, breaking the power of the Avars, a savage Hun-like people, nomads and plunderers, who for centuries had been the terror of their western neighbours. Finally, after thirty years of endless war, he mastered once and for all the Saxons, a trouble to the Franks since early Merovingian times. For thirteen years (772- 785) the history of the eastern frontier is a monotonous alternation of Frankish conquest, with the establishment of churches and abbeys in its wake, and Saxon risings in which all the civilising work of Charlemagne goes up in flame while priests and monks are murdered. The Frank's revenge was as brutal as its provocation. On one occasion as many as four thousand Saxons were beheaded in a single execution while he looked on. In the end he was master, and within a generation the Saxons, dragooned into Catholicism, compelled by force to receive baptism, were a Catholic people. When Charlemagne died, in 814, the whole of Western Europe that was Christian was again united under a single ruler, save for the British Isles and the remnants of Byzantine Italy.

This vast domain was not a mere congeries of widely differing peoples. Charlemagne was not the mere brutal soldier Charles Martel had been. He was a political idealist, and his empire was an ordered attempt to realise his ideals. He was educated, and his personal enthusiasm for learning never slackened throughout his long life. One of his favourite books was St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, and the State Charlemagne created was a very real attempt to organise the City of God on earth. For the first time in its history the Church had found a political genius wholly devoted to the task of realising the ideals of the Gospel. The State was to be the means of gaining the world for Christ, Charlemagne the immediate successor of St. Boniface. Never before, and certainly never since, has Catholicism been so identified with a political regime, and this not in order to serve the political ends of the regime but to be its inspiration and to direct it. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Charlemagne, in the last thirty years of his life, is the Catholic Church. He is the one human being on whose energy and good-will and loyalty the well- being of all depends.

In 779 he reorganised the hierarchy and, reversing his father's policy, adopted the system of metropolitans planned years before by St. Boniface — a conversion to ecclesiastical tradition due to Pope Adrian's gift of the collection of canons made by Denis the Short. The ancient sees were restored; and upon Mainz, and Salzburg, too, the pope now conferred metropolitan rights. The boundaries of the sees were strictly defined, and all monasteries subjected to the local bishop. At every turn the civil law came to the bishop's assistance, strengthening his hand for the correction of evildoers, whether clerics who lived unseemly lives or hunted, or laity who ignored say, the laws of fasting or who neglected to receive the sacraments. The same law, however, admonished and corrected the bishop, also; and it was the king, source of the law, who continued to name, absolutely, bishops and metropolitans alike. For all that the State was at the service of the Gospel, the ministers of the Gospel were by no means independent in their mission. The ideal of St. Amhrose132 was, even now, only partly realised. The decisions of synods and ecclesiastical councils had indeed the force of law, but the emperor too, when he chose, would legislate in ecclesiastical matters. Fortunately, from the point of view of the entente between Charles and the two popes with whom he had to deal (Adrian I and Leo III) the ecclesiastical affairs of his day were almost entirely matters of administration. How Catholicism would have fared had some great dispute on doctrine flared, and had Charles determined to decide it in the fashion traditional at Constantinople, is matter for speculation, but no more. For centuries before his time, in all the lands he now governed, the different kings had laid hands on ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the protests of the Church had gone unheeded. Much might be forgiven to Charlemagne, continuing the practice, since Charlemagne's ideals were those of the best of bishops and since — despite occasional bad failures in his own life — he was so whole-hearted in his loyalty to his ideals.

The clergy now played a greater part than ever before in the civil life of the empire. They provided all the chief officials of the highly organised civil service and the imperial diplomacy. These clerical ministers and officials were by no means always priests, though benefices were liberally showered on them, nor were they necessarily clerical in their way of life. Thus one of the king's chief ministers, Angilbert, was the Abbot of St. Riquier. He did much for the abbey, extending its buildings, enriching its library. He was one of the band of the court's literary men, as celebrated for his poems as for his success in the diplomatic missions on which the emperor employed him. He was also the lover of Charles' daughter Bertha and had two children by her. But this made no difference to his position, nor even to his relations with the emperor, who knew all. So firmly rooted, still, were the abuses to combat which St. Boniface and St. Columbanus had given their lives. Charlemagne's own private life presented an equally grotesque combination, with its tangle of wives that needs skill to unravel, to say nothing of ladies who were not even nominally wives.

Away from the court, there were, in all the chief towns of the empire, the local bishops. The civil law obliged them to live in their sees, to make regular visitations of the diocese, to hold annual synods. The bishop was obliged by law to see that all his clergy could explain the Pater Noster and the Creed, that they were conversant with the prescriptions of ecclesiastical law and the penitential codes, that they could administer the sacraments and preach. Preaching above all was, for Charlemagne, the most important duty of the priest, and his laws and admonitions to the bishops return to this subject time and again. To assist the priest whose own ability in this respect was small, Paul the Deacon, at the emperor's own command, compiled a book of sermons drawn from St. Augustine, St. Caesarius of Arles, St. Gregory and St. Bede, while St. Gregory's Regula Pastoralis was extensively circulated to serve as a general guide for the tasks of bishops and parochial clergy alike.

A further evidence of the emperor's concern for the promotion of virtue and learning in the clergy charged with the cure of souls, was his encouragement of the new way of life instituted by the Bishop of Metz, St. Chrodegang (767), one of the disciples of St. Boniface. St. Chrodegang had been, in his time, a high official of Charles Martel's chancery. As Bishop of Metz he had, later, been one of Pepin's envoys in the famous embassy of 754 to Pope Stephen II, through whose good offices he had, on the martyrdom of St. Boniface, succeeded to that saint's effectual primacy in Germany. He was one of the pioneers of liturgical reforms, introducing the Roman rite and the Cantilena Romana which later ages called the Gregorian Chant. But his most striking innovation was the establishment of the custom that, in the larger churches, which were served by a number of priests, the clergy should live a life in common under a rule. They gave up their private property, but retained the use of it personally. They kept also their hierarchical rank, priest, deacon, minor cleric. They assisted as a body at the daily church offices, were bound to receive Holy Communion on Sundays and feasts, to confess their sins twice annually. The rule made provision for systematic study, and it provided for a public correction of faults. the association took in all that vast personnel of clerics who made up the household of the Carolingian bishop, and also the boys and youths who were destined for the ecclesiastical state. It provided for grammar schools, seminary and chapter. Such an institution could not but appeal to Charlemagne, and he did much to encourage other bishops to adopt it.

For monks as monks the emperor had less favour. What monks there were, he strove to unite into a single system and one of his laws imposes the Benedictine rule on all monasteries, the emperor, with characteristic care, sending in 787 to Monte Cassino for an authentic copy of the rule.

It was piety informed by doctrine that was the quality dearest to Charlemagne's heart in ecclesiastics; the emperor, inevitably, once more the patron and protector of the clergy who were its agents. From the beginning of his reign he realised the degree to which Frankish Gaul was intellectually barbarous, and setting himself to attract the best minds of the day to the work of educating his clergy he turned to the country whence St. Boniface had come. One of St. Bede's pupils, Egbert, promoted to be Archbishop of York, had founded there the school which, at the time of Charlemagne's accession, was the intellectual centre of Europe. It was Egbert's pupil Alcuin, head of the school of York and the greatest scholar of his time, whom Charlemagne now persuaded to settle in Gaul. From Italy he brought Peter of Pisa and Paul Warnefrid, the historian of the Lombards. Spain was represented by Theodulf, whom Charles made Bishop of Orleans, a poet whose memory has outlasted much else if only because of the place of one of his hymns, Gloria laus et honor, in the liturgy of Holy Week.

The first of the schools through which these carefully gathered men of letters worked upon the new Christendom, was the imperial court itself. Set lectures, conversation classes, intellectual games in which Charlemagne's own determined enthusiasm led unflaggingly, were some of the means. And wherever the emperor went, there, too, went the imperial school. Moreover, each see, each monastery, each parish was commanded to have its school. Of the monastic schools Tours, where Alcuin himself was abbot, was the greatest. It developed into a kind of training school, whence teachers went out to revive the intellectual life of other abbeys and sees. Fulda too, the foundation of St. Boniface, bore testimony in its new intellectual strength to the scholarship which was its own founder's first title to recognition, and to the zeal for learning which he never lost and which the continual stream of missionary monks from England kept continuously alive in the heart of Germany. From Fulda came the leading intellectuals of the first quarter of the ninth century, Eginhard who was Charlemagne's biographer, Walafrid Strabo, and Rabanus Maurus.

Charles, as part of his great scheme of Christian restoration, gave force of law to all the reforms which St. Boniface had so desiderated. He showed himself equally the heir of the saint in his zeal to capture for the Gospel the still heathen tribes of the north and east. Under his patronage, protected by his power, the work of the mission went steadily forward. The Slavs then settled in central Germany, the Frisians at whose hands St. Boniface had met his death, the Saxons as far as the Elbe, the Slavs of Carinthia, and even the Avars, turn by turn submitted, often to the none too happy combination of Frankish political necessity and the disinterested zeal of the children of St. Boniface. By the time Charlemagne died, the frontier of the advance of Catholicism lay many miles ahead of the political frontier of his empire.

Against this policy which made loyalty to the empire and to Catholicism one thing, with its practical sequel of forcible baptism, all that was best in the life of the time protested. The Patriarch of Aquileia was able to induce the emperor's eldest son Pepin, the King of Italy, to put no compulsion of this sort upon the Avars whom he had recently conquered (796). They were, in the mass, ready to embrace Catholicism, and from the Danube to the Adriatic a vast campaign of instruction now opened in preparation for their baptism. Alcuin lent all his prestige to second the efforts of these frontier bishops in the delicate task of preserving the purity of faith from the taint of political policy. Tithes, he had heard, were destroying the faith of the Saxons. A bishop should not be chiefly famous for his severity in exacting such dues. And though baptism might be forcibly performed on the unwilling, faith was another matter. Such gifts of God came through prayer. Nor should the rigour of the Church's penitential code be applied to the letter, in the case of newly-converted peoples.

In what measure the spirit of Alcuin and Paulinus of Aquileia prevailed, in general, over the barbarian ruthlessness of Charles it is not possible to say. The incidents serve to illustrate, yet once again, the mortal danger to the Faith whenever zeal for its propaganda is inspired by any spirit less pure than that of the Faith itself. It was not the only way in which the magnificent protectorship of Charles, and the incredible scale of his success, threatened the life of the Church. Like his grandfather before him, he treated all Church property as his own. The abbeys, which the policy of St. Boniface had tended to save from the terrible episcopate of his day by exempting them from the jurisdiction of the local bishop, Charlemagne riveted to that jurisdiction more closely than ever. Again, like his grandfather, he used abbatial nominations — for the custom that the monks elected their abbot had disappeared entirely — to reward faithful service to the State. Abbeys were given to clerics who were not monks, and even to laymen. The abbot — and the bishop too — had to bear his share of the imperial burden. St. Boniface had fought against the abuse that clerics bore arms. Now the emperor ordained the use of arms as a duty. In time of war the abbot or bishop was to join the army at the head of the fully equipped troop that was his quota to the forces. The abbeys of Charlemagne's time were no longer merely convents of monks, whose lives were given over to prayer and mortification. They were the great centres of national life, functioning in the social organism as the cities had functioned in the Roman Empire. Prayer there was undoubtedly, and much means of sanctification, but around the abbey, attracted thither by the abbey, was all the life of the immense domain which depended, ultimately, upon the monks for the intelligent direction which had first created its economic life and which, alone, maintained it in being. That in the abbey, by the side of church, school, farm, workshops and market, courts and prison there was also now the barracks, was a new development in no wise revolutionary.

Christendom and the Carolingian state were for a century practically coterminous, and for half of that time the Carolingian state was Charlemagne. Over the whole vast edifice he presided, as a tradition after his death, but in his life, as a very concrete reality, appointing the innumerable counts and bishops who were the permanent local agents of his policies and the missi who periodically issued forth from the centre of government to inspect the working of the machine and to correct abuses. He was in many respects the greatest political force the Church had yet possessed. As his resources were so much less than those of the three great Christian emperors who preceded him — Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian — so does his use of them deservedly set him higher. He was an immediate social force of a magnitude they never equalled; and this by reason of his Catholicism and of his close unity with the popes, whom he dwarfed in every respect, who were very much his subjects, and yet to whose spiritual hegemony he was, in a matter-of-course way, always subordinate. How great his achievement — in the matter of the extension and development of Catholicism, for example — can readily be seen if the state of Catholicism, as he left it behind him at death, be compared with its state a hundred years earlier, at the accession of his grandfather, Charles Martel. Of that great restoration Charlemagne was not the principal agent. St. Boniface, and the multitude of disinterested monastic apostles whom he inspired and led, the Roman popes to whom at every turn St. Boniface looked, and not in vain, for guidance and support, hold here an unshakable primacy. Yet had it not been for Charlemagne, all that great work would never have survived to bear even its first fruits. The immense machine he set up was, however, for all its maker's sincerity, inspired by a spirit that had in it too little of St. Boniface, too little of the Gospel. Its successful working called, also, for a Charlemagne simultaneously present throughout its vast whole, and he strove to achieve this through his legates, the missi. Its permanence called for a succession of Charlemagne's through time — and this, fortunately for the religion of the Church, no man could secure. Fortunately: for, with the creation in the West of yet such another system as that which, for now some centuries, had been slowly choking Catholicism to death in the Roman empire of the East, the ultimate fate of the Church must have been worse than even the terrible things which the next century held in store.

Notes

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