The Roman and the Teuton Part 15

But, as M. Sismondi well remarks, their very ignorance and brutality made them the more easily the tools of the Roman clergy: 'Cette haute veneration pour l'Eglise, et leur severe orthodoxie, d'autant plus facile a conserver que, ne faisant aucune etude, et ne disputant jamais sur la foi, ils ne connaissaient pas meme les questions controversees, leur donnerent dans le clerge de puissants auxiliaires. Les Francs se montrerent disposes a hair les Ariens, a les combattres, et les depouiller sans les entendre; les eveques, en retour, ne se montrerent pas scrupuleux sur le reste des enseignements moraux de la religion: ils fermerent les yeux sur les violences, le meurtre, le dereglement des moeurs; ils autoriserent en quelque sorte publiquement la poligamie, et ils precherent le droit divin des rois et le devoir le l'obeissance pour les peuples {279}.'

A painful picture of the alliance: but, I fear, too true.

The history of these Franks you must read for yourselves. You will find it well told in the pages of Sismondi, and in Mr. Perry's excellent book, 'The Franks.' It suffices now to say, that in the days of Luitprand these Franks, after centuries of confusion and bloodshed, have been united into one great nation, stretching from the Rhine to the Loire and the sea, and encroaching continually to the southward and eastward. The government has long pa.s.sed out of the hands of their faineant Meerwing kings into that of the semi-hereditary Majores Domus, or Mayors of the Palace; and Charles Martel, perhaps the greatest of that race of great men, has just made himself mayor of Austrasia (the real Teutonic centre of Frank life and power), Neustria and Burgundy. He has crushed Eudo, the duke of Romanized Aquitaine, and has finally delivered France and Christendom from the invading Saracens. On his Franks, and on the Lombards of Italy, rest, for the moment, the destinies of Europe.

For meanwhile another portent has appeared, this time out of the far East. Another swarm of destroyers has swept over the earth. The wild Arabs of the desert, awakening into sudden life and civilization under the influence of a new creed, have overwhelmed the whole East, the whole north of Africa, destroying the last relics of Roman and Greek civilization, and with them the effete and semi-idolatrous Christianity of the Empire. All the work of Na.r.s.es and Belisarius is undone. Arab Emirs rule in the old kingdom of the Vandals. The new human deluge has crossed the Straits into Europe. The Visigoths, enervated by the luxurious climate of Spain, have recoiled before the Mussulman invaders.

Roderick, the last king of the Goths, is wandering as an unknown penitent in expiation of his sin against the fair Cava, which brought down (so legends and ballads tell) the scourge of G.o.d upon the hapless land; and the remnants of the old Visigoths and Sueves are crushed together into the mountain fastnesses of Asturias and Gallicia, thence to reissue, after long centuries, as the n.o.ble Spanish nation, wrought in the forges of adversity into the likeness of tempered steel; and destined to reconquer, foot by foot, their native land from the Moslem invader.

But at present the Crescent was master of the Cross; and beyond the Pyrenees all was slavery and 'miscreance.' The Arabs, invading France in 732, in countless thousands, had been driven back at the great fight of Tours, with a slaughter so great, that the excited imagination of Paulus Diaconus sees 375,000 miscreants dead upon the field, while only 1500 Franks had perished. But home troubles had prevented 'the Hammer of the Moors' from following up his victory. The Saracens had returned in force in 737, and again in 739. They still held Narbonne. The danger was imminent. There was no reason why they should not attempt a third invasion. Why should they not spread along the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, establis.h.i.+ng themselves there, as they were already doing in Sicily, and menacing Rome from north as well as south? To unite, therefore, the two great Catholic Teutonic powers, the Frank and the Lombard, for the defence of Christendom, should have been the policy of him who called himself the Chief Pontiff in Christendom. Yet the Pope preferred, in the face of that great danger, to set the Teutonic nations on destroying each other, rather than to unite them against the Moslem.

The bribe offered to the Frank was significant--the t.i.tle of Roman Consul; beside which he was to have filings of St. Peter's chains, and the key of his tomb, to preserve him body and soul from all evil.

Charles would not come. Frank though he was, he was too honourable to march at a priest's bidding against Luitprand, his old brother in arms, to whom he had sent the boy Pepin, his son, that Luitprand might take him on his knee, and cut his long royal hair, and become his father-in-arms, after the good old Teuton fas.h.i.+on; Luitprand, who with his Lombards had helped him to save Christendom a second time from the Mussulman in 737.

The Pope, one would think, should have remembered that good deed of the good Lombard's whereof his epitaph sings,

'Deinceps tremuere feroces Usque Saraceni, quos dispulit impiger, ipsos c.u.m premerent Gallos, Karolo poscente juvari.'

So Charles Martel took the t.i.tle of Patrician from the Pope, but sent him no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the measure of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul which his sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is now, as St.

Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing therefore in the lowest abyss of h.e.l.l.

So one generation more pa.s.ses by; and then Pepin le Bref, grown to manhood, is less scrupulous than his father. He is bound to the Pope by grat.i.tude. The Pope has confirmed him as king, allowing him to depose the royal house of the Merovingians, and so a.s.sumed the right of making kings.--A right which future popes will not forget.

Meanwhile the Pope has persuaded the Lombard king Rachis to go into a monastery. Astulf seizes the crown, and attacks Ravenna. The Pope succeeding, Stephen III., opposes him; and he marches on Rome, threatening to a.s.sault it, unless the citizens redeem their lives by a poll-tax.

Stephen determines to go himself to Pepin to ask for help: and so awful has the name and person of a Pope become, that he is allowed to do it; allowed to pa.s.s safely and unarmed through the very land upon which he is going to let loose all the horrors of invading warfare.

It is a strange, and instructive figure, that. The dread of the unseen, the fear of spiritual power, has fallen on the wild Teutons; on Frank and on Lombard alike. The Pope and his clergy are to them magicians, against whom neither sword nor lance avails; who can heal the sick and blast the sound; who can call to their aid out of the clouds that pantheon of demi- G.o.ds, with which, under the name of saints, they have peopled heaven; who can let loose on them the legions of fiends who dwell in every cave, every forest, every ruin, every cloud; who can, by the sentence of excommunication, destroy both body and soul in h.e.l.l. They were very loth to fear G.o.d, these wild Teutons; therefore they had instead, as all men have who will not fear G.o.d, to fear the devil.

So Pope Stephen goes to Pepin, the eldest son of the Church. He promises to come with all his Franks. Stephen's conscience seems to have been touched: he tries to have no fighting, only negotiation: but it is too late now. Astolf will hear of no terms; Pepin sweeps over the Alps, and at the gates of Pavia dictates his own terms to the Lombards. The old Lombard spirit seems to have past away.

Pepin goes back again, and Astolf refuses to fulfil his promises. The Pope sends Pepin that letter from St. Peter himself with which this lecture commenced.

Astolf has marched down, as we heard, to the walls of Rome, laying the land waste; cutting down the vines, carrying off consecrated vessels, insulting the sacrament of the altar. The Lombards have violated nuns; and tried to kill them, the Pope says; though, if they had really tried, one cannot see why they should not have succeeded. In fact, Pope Stephen's hysterical orations to Pepin must be received with extreme caution. No Catholic historian of that age cares to examine the truth of a fact which makes for him; nothing is too bad to say of an enemy: and really the man who would forge a letter from St. Peter might dare to tell a few lesser falsehoods into the bargain. Pepin cannot but obey so august a summons; and again he is in Italy, and the Lombards dare not resist him. He seizes not only all that Astolf had taken from the Pope, but the Pentapolis and Exarchate, the property, if of any one, of the Greek Emperors, and bestows them on Stephen, the Pope, and 'the holy Roman Republic.'

The pope's commissioners received the keys of the towns, which were placed upon the altar of St. Peter; and this, the Dotation of Pepin, the Dotation of the Exarchate, was the first legal temporal sovereignty of the Popes:--born in sin, and conceived in iniquity, as you may see.

The Lombard rule now broke up rapidly. The Lombards of Spoleto yielded to the double pressure of Franks and Romans, asked to be 'taken into the service of St. Peter,' and clipt their long German locks after the Roman fas.h.i.+on.

Charlemagne, in his final invasion, had little left to do. He confirmed Pepin's gift, and even, though he hardly kept his promise, enlarged it to include the whole of Italy, from Lombardy to the frontier of Naples, while he himself became king of Lombardy, and won the iron crown.

And so by French armies--not for the last time--was the Pope propt up on his ill-gotten throne.

But the mere support of French armies was not enough to seat the Pope securely upon the throne of the western Caesars. Doc.u.mentary evidence was required to prove that they possessed Rome, not as the va.s.sals of the Frankish Kaisers, or of any barbarian Teutons whatsoever; but in their own right, as hereditary sovereigns of Rome. And the doc.u.ments, when needed, were forthcoming. Under the name of St. Isidore, some ready scribe produced the too-famous 'Decretals,' and the 'Donation of Constantine,' and Pope Adrian I. saw no reason against publis.h.i.+ng them to Charlemagne and to the world.

It was discovered suddenly, by means of these remarkable doc.u.ments, that Constantine the Great had been healed of leprosy, and afterwards baptized, by Pope Sylvester; that he had, in grat.i.tude for his cure, resigned to the Popes his western throne, and the patrimony of St. Peter, and the sovereignty of Italy and the West; and that this was the true reason of his having founded Constantinople, as a new seat of government for the remnant of his empire.

This astounding falsehood was, of course, accepted humbly by the unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come. It is said--I trust not truly--to be still enrolled among the decrees of the Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics. Be that as it may, on the strength of this doc.u.ment the Popes began to a.s.sume an all but despotic sovereignty over the western world, and--the Teutonic peoples, and Rome's conquest of her conquerors was at last complete.

What then were the causes of the Papal hatred of a race who were good and devout Catholics for the last 200 years of their rule?

There were deep political reasons (in the strictest, and I am afraid lowest sense of the word); but over and above them there were evidently moral reasons, which lay even deeper still.

A free, plain-spoken, practical race like these Lombards; living by their own laws; disbelieving in witchcraft; and seemingly doing little for monasticism, were not likely to find favour in the eyes of popes. They were not the material which the Papacy could mould into the Neapolitan ideal of 'Little saints,--and little a.s.ses.' These Lombards were not a superst.i.tious race; they did not, like the Franks and Anglo-Saxons, crowd into monasteries. I can only find four instances of Lombard sovereigns founding monasteries in all Paulus' history. One of them, strangely enough, is that of the very Astulf against whom the Pope fulminated so loudly the letter from St. Peter which I read you.

Moreover, it must be said in all fairness--the Lombards despised the Romans exceedingly. So did all the Teutons. 'We Lombards,' says Bishop Luitprand, 'Saxons, Franks, Lorrainers, Bavarians, Sueves, Burgunds, consider it a sufficient insult to call our enemy a Roman; comprehending in that one name of Roman, whatever is ign.o.ble, cowardly, avaricious, luxurious, false, in a word, every vice.' If this was--as it very probably was--the feeling of the whole Teutonic race; and if it was repaid--as it certainly was--on the part of the Roman, by contempt for the 'barbarism' and 'ignorance' of the Teuton; what must have been the feeling between Roman and Lombard? Contact must have embittered mutual contempt into an utter and internecine hatred, in which the Pope, as representative of the Roman people, could not but share.

As for the political reasons, they are clear enough. It is absurd to say that they wished to free Italy from Lombard tyrants. What did they do but hand her over to Frankish tyrants instead? No. The true reason was this. Gradually there had arisen in the mind of all Popes, from Gregory the Great onward, the idea of a spiritual supremacy, independent of all kings of the earth. It was a great idea, as the event proved: it was a beneficent one for Europe; but a ruinous one for Italy. For the Popes were not content with spiritual power. They could not conceive of it as separated from temporal power, and temporal power meant land. How early they set their hearts on the Exarchate of Ravenna, we shall never know: the fact is patent, that it was a Naboth's vineyard to them; and that to obtain it they called in the Franks.

Their dread was, evidently, lest the Lombards should become masters of the whole of Italy. A united Italy suited their views then, no more than it does now. Not only did they conceive of Rome as still the centre of the western world, but more, their stock in trade was at Rome. The chains of St. Peter, the sepulchres of St. Peter and St. Paul, the catacombs filled with the bones of innumerable martyrs;--these were their stock in trade. By giving these, selling these, working miracles with these, calling pilgrims from all parts of Christendom to visit these in situ, they kept up their power and their wealth. I do not accuse them of misusing that power and that wealth in those days. They used them, on the contrary, better than power and wealth had been ever used in the world before. But they were dependent on the sanct.i.ty attached to a particular spot; and any power, which, like the Lombard, tended to give Italy another centre than Rome, they dreaded and disliked. That Lombard basilica, near Milan, with all its treasures, must have been in their eyes, a formidable rival. Still more frightful must it have been to them to see Astulf, when he encamped before the walls of Rome, searching for martyrs' relics, and carrying them off to Milan. That, as a fact, seems to have been the exciting cause of Stephen's journey to Pepin. This Astulf was a good Catholic. He founded a nunnery, and put his own daughters in it. What could a man do more meritorious in the eyes of the Pope? But he took away the lands of the Church, and worse, the relics, the reserved capital by which the Church purchased lands. This was indeed a crime only to be expiated by the horrors of a Frank invasion.

On the same principle the Popes supported the Exarchs of Ravenna, and the independent duchies of Spoleto and Beneventum. Well or ill ruled, Iconoclast or not, they were necessary to keep Italy divided and weak.

And having obtained what they wanted from Pepin and Charlemagne, it was still their interest to pursue the same policy; to compound for their own independence, as they did with Charlemagne and his successors, by defending the pretences of foreign kings to the sovereignty of the rest of Italy. This has been their policy for centuries. It is their policy still; and that policy has been the curse of Italy. This fatal gift of the patrimony of St. Peter--as Dante saw--as Machiavelli saw,--as all clear-sighted Italians have seen,--as we are seeing it now in these very days--has kept her divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered by foreign invaders. Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his dominions into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable, as the hierophant of a priestly caste, to unite his people in the bonds of national life; unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for himself; and form it into a kingdom large enough to have weight in the balance of power; the Pope has been forced, again and again, to keep himself on his throne by intriguing with foreign princes, and calling in foreign arms; and the bane of Italy, from the time of Stephen III. to that of Pius IX., has been the temporal power of the Pope.

But on the popes, also, the Nemesis came. In building their power on the Roman relics, on the fable that Rome was the patrimony of Peter, they had built on a lie; and that lie avenged itself.

Had they been independent of the locality of Rome; had they been really spiritual emperors, by becoming cosmopolitan, journeying, it may be, from nation to nation in regular progresses, then their power might have been as boundless as they ever desired it should be. Having committed themselves to the false position of being petty kings of a petty kingdom, they had to endure continual treachery and tyranny from their foreign allies; to see not merely Italy, but Rome itself insulted, and even sacked, by faithful Catholics; and to become more and more, as the centuries rolled on, the tools of those very kings whom they had wished to make their tools.

True, they defended themselves long, and with astonis.h.i.+ng skill and courage. Their sources of power were two, the moral, and the thaumaturgic; and they used them both: but when the former failed, the latter became useless. As long as their moral power was real; as long as they and their clergy were on the whole, in spite of enormous faults, the best men in Europe; so long the people believed in them, and in their thaumaturgic relics likewise. But they became by no means the best men in Europe. Then they began to think that after all it was more easy to work the material than the moral power--easier to work the bones than to work righteousness. They were deceived. Behold! when the righteousness was gone, the bones refused to work. People began to question the virtues of the bones, and to ask, We can believe that the bones may have worked miracles for good men, but for bad men? We will examine whether they work any miracles at all. And then, behold, it came out that the bones did not work miracles, and that possibly they were not saints'

bones at all; and then the storm came: and the lie, as all lies do, punished itself. The salt had lost its savour. The Teutonic intellect appealed from its old masters to G.o.d, and to G.o.d's universe of facts, and emanc.i.p.ated itself once and for all. They who had been the light of Europe, became its darkness; they who had been first, became last; a warning to mankind until the end of time, that on Truth and Virtue depends the only abiding strength.

LECTURE XII--THE STRATEGY OF PROVIDENCE

I no not know whether any of you know much of the theory of war. I know very little myself. But something of it one is bound to know, as Professor of History. For, unfortunately, a large portion of the history of mankind is the history of war; and the historian, as a man who wants to know how things were done--as distinct from the philosopher, the man who wants to know how things ought to have been done--ought to know a little of the first of human arts--the art of killing. What little I know thereof I shall employ to-day, in explaining to you the invasion of the Teutons, from a so-called mechanical point of view. I wish to shew you how it was possible for so small and uncivilized a people to conquer one so vast and so civilized; and what circ.u.mstances (which you may attribute to what cause you will: but I to G.o.d) enabled our race to conquer in the most vast and important campaign the world has ever seen.

I call it a campaign rather than a war. Though it lasted 200 years and more, it seems to me (it will, I think, seem to you) if you look at the maps, as but one campaign: I had almost said, one battle. There is but one problem to be solved; and therefore the operations of our race take a sort of unity. The question is, how to take Rome, and keep it, by destroying the Roman Empire.

Let us consider the two combatants--their numbers, and their position.

One glance at the map will shew you which are the most numerous. When you cast your eye over the vastness of the Roman Empire from east to west--Italy, Switzerland, half Austria, Turkey and Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, France, Britain--and then compare it with the narrow German strip which reaches from the mouth of the Danube to the mouth of the Rhine, the disparity of area is enormous; ten times as great at least; perhaps more, if you accept, as I am inclined to do, the theory of Dr. Latham, that we were always 'Markmen,' men of the Marches, occupying a narrow frontier between the Slavs and the Roman Empire; and that Tacitus has included among Germans, from hearsay, many tribes of the interior of Bohemia, Prussia, and Poland, who were Slavs or others; and that the numbers and area of our race has been, on Tacitus'

authority, greatly overrated.

What then were the causes of the success of the Teutons? Native courage and strength?

They had these: but you must recollect what I have told you, that those very qualities were employed against them; that they were hired, in large numbers, into the Roman armies, to fight against their own brothers.

Unanimity? Of that, alas! one can say but little. The great Teutonic army had not only to fight the Romans, but to fight each brigade the brigade before it, to make them move on; and the brigade behind it likewise, to prevent their marching over them; while too often two brigades quarrelled like children, and destroyed each other on the spot.

What, then, was the cause of their success? I think a great deal of it must be attributed to their admirable military position.

Look at a map of Europe; putting yourself first at the point to be attacked--at Rome, and looking north, follow the German frontier from the Euxine up the Danube and down the Rhine. It is a convex arc: but not nearly as long as the concave arc of the Roman frontier opposed to it.

The Roman frontier overlaps it to the north-west by all Britain, to the south-west by part of Turkey and the whole of Asia Minor.

That would seem to make it weak, and liable to be outflanked on either wing. In reality it made it strong.

Both the German wings rested on the sea; one on the Euxine, one on the North Sea. That in itself would not have given strength; for the Roman fleets were masters of the seas. But the lands in the rear, on either flank, were deserts, incapable of supporting an army. What would have been the fate of a force landed at the mouth of the Weser on the north, or at the mouth of the Dnieper at the west? Starvation among wild moors, and bogs, and steppes, if they attempted to leave their base of operations on the coast. The Romans saw this, and never tried the plan.