The Church and the Barbarians Part 10

[1] According to the chronicle of Kristian.

[2] The Sat.u.r.day fast was still observed in many parts of Christendom.

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CHAPTER XII

PROGRESS OF THE CHURCH IN GERMANY

[Sidenote: The Lombards in Italy.]

The acceptance of Christianity and of Catholicism by the barbarian tribes which conquered Europe was a slow process. The conversion of the Lombards, for example, whom we have seen as Arians, sometimes tolerant, sometimes persecuting, was gradual. The Church always held its own, in faith though not in possessions, in Italy; and from the pontificate of Gregory the Great the moral force of the Catholic Society began to win the Lombards to its fold. It was proved again and again that heresy was not a unifying power. The Catholic Church held together its disciples in the Catholic creed. It is possible that Agilulf, the husband of the famous Catholic queen Theodelind, himself became a Catholic before he died. Paul the Deacon says that he "both held the Catholic faith and bestowed many possessions on the Church of Christ, and restored the bishops, who were in a depressed and abject condition, to the honour of their wonted dignity." Whatever may be the meaning of this, it certainly expresses the fact that before the middle of the seventh century the Lombards were pa.s.sing almost insensibly into the Catholic fold, and Italy had practically become united in one faith though far from united in one government.

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[Sidenote: The Church in the Frankish kingdoms.]

With Germany it was different. As the Merwing kingdoms decayed, the Eastern one, Austrasia, with its capital, Metz, was but a poor bulwark against heathen tribes on its borders, which were yet, it might seem at times, little more barbarous than itself. The kingdom of Austrasia stretched eastwards from Rheims "spreading across the Rhine an unknown distance into Germany, claiming the allegiance of Thuringians, Alamanni and Bavarians, fitfully controlling the restless Saxons, touching with warlike weapons and sometimes vainly striving with the terrible Avars."

[1] Kings of the Bavarian line came to rule in Northern Italy, but Bavaria was little touched by Christian faith. At last when the descendants of Arnulf[2] came as kings over a now again united Frankish monarchy, when Charles Martel made one power of Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, the time for a new advance seemed to have come.

Theodelind, the Catholic queen of the Lombards, was herself of Bavarian birth, but a century after her time the people of her native land, it seems, were still heathen. They were apart from the Roman civilisation and the Catholic tradition: conversion, to touch them, must be a direct and aggressive movement.

At the end of the seventh century S. Rupert began the work. He settled his episcopal throne at Salzburg. He was followed by Emmeran, and by Corbinian. Slowly the work proceeded, hindered by violence on the part of dukes and saints, favoured by popes and making a beginning for Roman missionary interest in the distant borders of the Empire under the Germans.

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But it was not to these Frankish missionaries, or to Roman envoys, that the most important work was due. It was due to an outburst of converting zeal on the part of the newly converted race who had made Britain the land of the English.

[Sidenote: Saint Boniface.]

Of all the great missionaries of the eighth century perhaps the greatest was Winfrith of Crediton, an Englishman who became the father of German Christianity and the precursor of the great religious and intellectual movement of the days of Charles the Great. He followed the Northumbrian Willibrord who for twenty-six years had laboured in Frisia, and supported by the commission of Gregory II. he set forth in 719 to preach to the fierce heathens of Germany. He was instructed to use the Roman rite and to report to Rome any difficulties he might encounter. He began to labour in Thuringia, a land where Irish missionaries had already been at work, and where he recalled the Christians from evil ways into which they had lapsed. He pa.s.sed on through Neustria and thence to Frisia, where for three years he "laboured much in Christ, converting not a few, destroying the heathen shrines and building Christian oratories," aiding the venerable Willibrord in the work he had so long carried on. But he felt the call to labour in lands as yet untouched, and so he determined to go to the Germans. As he pa.s.sed up the Rhine he drew to him the boy Gregory afterwards famous as abbat of Utrecht, and at last he settled in the forests of Hessen and built a monastery at Amoneburg. From his old friends in England he received sound advice as to the treatment of heathen customs and the gentle methods of conversion which befit the gospel of {137} Christ. [Sidenote: His mission from Rome, 723.] From Rome he received affectionate support; and in 722 he was summoned to receive a new mission from the pope himself. On S. Andrew's Day, 723,[3] after a solemn profession of faith in the Holy Trinity and of obedience to the Roman See--the first ever taken by one outside the Roman patriarchate--he was consecrated bishop. He set out with letters from the pope to Christians of Thuringia and to the duke Charles.

Charles Martel accepted the trust and gave to Winfrith (who had a.s.sumed the name of Boniface) the pledge of his protection. The missionary's first act on his return to Hessen was to destroy the ancient oak at Geismar, the object of devotion to the wors.h.i.+ppers of the Germanic G.o.ds; and the act was followed by many conversions of those who saw that heathenism could not resent the attack upon its sacred things.

Still there were difficulties. Those who had learned from the old Celtic mission were not ready to accept the Roman customs. Gregory II.

wrote in 724, exhorting him to perseverance: "Let not threats alarm thee, nor terrors cast thee down, but stayed in confidence on G.o.d proclaim the word of truth." The work grew: monasteries and churches arose: many English helpers came over: the favour of Charles Martel was a protection. As the Benedictines opened out new lands, ploughed, built, studied, taught, religion and education spread before him.

[Sidenote: Boniface archbishop, 732.] In 732 Boniface was made archbishop, received a pallium from Rome, and was encouraged by the new pope Gregory III. to organise the Church which he had founded and {138} to spread forth his arms into the land of the Bavarians. There Christianity had already made some way under Frankish missionaries: it needed organisation from the hand of a master. He "exercised himself diligently," says his biographer Willibald, "in preaching, and went round inspecting many churches." In 738 he paid his last visit to Rome, where he stayed nearly a year and was treated with extraordinary respect and affection. On his return he divided Bavaria into the four dioceses of Salzburg, Regensburg, Freising, and Pa.s.sau, and later on he founded other sees also, including Wurzburg. It was his next aim to do something to reform the lax morals of the Frankish Church, which had sunk to a low ebb under the Merwings. The Austrasian Synod, which bears in some respects a close resemblance to the almost contemporary English Synod of Clovesho (747), of 742 dealt boldly with these matters. Other councils followed in which Boniface took a leading part, and which made a striking reformation. [Sidenote: His missionary work and martyrdom.] His equally important work was to complete the conquest of the general spirit of Western Christendom, which looked to Rome for leaders.h.i.+p, over the Celtic missionaries, n.o.ble missionaries and martyrs who yet lacked the instinct of cohesion and solidarity. A long series of letters, to the popes, to bishops, princes and persons of importance, shows the breadth of his interests and the nature of his activity. To "four peoples," he says, he had preached the gospel, the Hessians, Thuringians, Franks and Bavarians, not to all for the first time but as a reformer and one who removed heathen influences from the Church. As Archbishop of Mainz he was untiring even in advanced age: in politics as well as in {139} religion he was a leader of men. It was he who anointed Pippin at Soissons in 751 and thus gave the Church's sanction to the new Karling line. He determined to end his days as a missionary to the heathen. In 755 he went with a band of priests and monks once more to the wild Frisians, and at Dokk.u.m by the northern sea he met his death at the hands of the heathen whom he came to win to Christ. The day, ever remembered, was June 5, 755.

Boniface was truly attached to the popes, truly respectful to the Roman See: but he preserved his independence. His att.i.tude towards the secular power was precisely similar. He was a great churchman, a great statesman, a great missionary; but his religious and political opinions cannot be tied down to the limits of some strict theory. His was a wide, genial nature, in things spiritual and in things temporal genuine, sincere; a true Saint, a true Apostle. Through the lives and sacrifices of such men it was that the Church came to exercise so profound an influence over the politics of the Middle Age.

[Sidenote: The Emperors and missions.]

The work which S. Boniface began was continued by weapons other than his own. When the Empire of the Romans was revived (as we shall tell in the next chapter) by the chiefs of the Arnulf house, when a Catholic Caesar was again acclaimed in the Roman churches, the ideas on which the new monarchy was to rest were decisively Christian and Catholic.

Charles the son of Pippin was a student of theology, among many other things. He believed firmly that it was a real kingdom of G.o.d which he was called to form and govern upon earth. The spirit which inspired the followers of {140} Muhammad inspired him too. He was determined not to leave to priests and popes the propagation of the faith which he believed.

[Sidenote: Charles and the Saxons.]

For thirty-two years Charles the Great, as his people came to call him, was engaged in a war which claimed to be waged for the spread of the Christian faith. Charles was before all things in belief (though not always in life) a Christian, and it was intolerable to him that within the German lands should remain a large and powerful body of heathens.

In 772 he marched into the land of the Angarii and destroyed the Irminsul, a column which was representative of the power which the Saxons wors.h.i.+pped. It was destroyed, and the army after its victories returned in triumph. In 774 the Saxons turned the tables and burnt the abbey of Fritzlar which had been founded by S. Boniface. In 775 Charles resolved to avenge this loss, but made little progress. In 776 he was more successful, and a great mult.i.tude of Saxons submitted and were baptized. In 777 there was another great baptism, but, says the chronicler, the Saxons were perfidious. In 778 when Charles was in Spain the Saxons devastated a vast tract of land, and even for a time stole the body of S. Boniface from its tomb at Fulda. Charles crushed the resistance, and from 780 he set himself to organise the Church in the Saxon lands, issuing severe edicts which practically enforced Christianity on the conquered Saxons with the penalty of death for the performance of pagan rites, and even for eating meat in Lent. A law was also decreed that all men should give a tenth of their substance and work to the churches and priests. Still the conquest was not {141} durable, for a terrible insurrection in 782 slew a whole army of the Germans and ma.s.sacred priests and monks wherever they could be found.

Then came years of carnage: once Charles--it is said--caused 4,500 Saxons to be beheaded in one day. In 793 there was a new outbreak.

The Saxons "as a dog returneth to his vomit so returned they to the paganism they had renounced, again deserting Christian faith and lying not less to G.o.d than to their lord the king." Churches were destroyed, bishops and priests slain, and the land was again defiled with blood.

They allied with the Avars, and Charles was thus beset with heathen foes in Hungary and in North Germany at once. He tried every measure of devastation and exile; but it seems that by 797 he had come more clearly to see the Christian way. "Let but the same pains be taken,"

he wrote--or the English scholar Alcuin wrote for him--"to preach the easy yoke and light burden of Christ to the obstinate people of the Saxons as are taken to collect the t.i.thes from them or to punish the least transgression of the laws imposed on them, and perhaps they would be found no longer to repel baptism with abhorrence." But he was far from always acting up to this view, and he even allied with heathen Slavs to accomplish the subjugation of his enemies. As he conquered he mapped out the land in bishoprics and planted monasteries at important points: he took Saxon boys to his court and sent them back trained, often as ecclesiastics, to teach and rule. Among such was Ebbo, afterwards Archbishop of Rheims, the "Apostle of Denmark." From abroad too came other missionaries, and notable among them was another Englishman, Willehad of {142} Northumbria, who became in 788 the first bishop of Bremen. At last Christianity was, at least nominally, in possession from the Rhine to the Elbe, and in the words of Einhard "thus they were brought to accept the terms of the king, and thus they gave up their demon wors.h.i.+p, renounced their national religious customs, embraced the Christian faith, received the divine sacraments, and were united with the Franks, forming one people."

Under Charles the organisation of the German Church, begun by Boniface, received a great extension. It was possible, after his death, to regard Germany as Christian and as organised in its religion on the lines of all the Western Churches.

[1] Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, v. 203.

[2] See p. 1-14.

[3] This seems to me the most probable date. Cf. Hauck, _Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands_, i. 448.

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CHAPTER XIII

THE POPES AND THE REVIVAL OF THE EMPIRE

[Sidenote: Growth of papal power.]

The growth of the temporal power of the bishops of Rome was due to two causes, the withdrawal of the imperial authority from Italy and the conversion of the barbarians. As the emperors at Constantinople became more and more busied with affairs Eastern, with the encroachments of barbarians, heathen and Muhammadan, and the imperial rule in Italy was destroyed by the Lombards, the popes stood out as the one permanent inst.i.tution in Northern and Central Italy. As gradually the barbarians came to accept the faith they received it at the hands of the great ecclesiastical organisation which kept together the traditions, so strangely transformed, of the Old Rome. The legislation of Justinian also had given great political power to the popes: and this power was greatly increased when the papacy found itself the leader in the resistance of the great majority of Christian peoples against the policy of the Iconoclastic emperors. The history of Rome began to run on very different lines from that of Venice, Naples, or other great cities. It became for a while a conflict between the local military n.o.bility and the clergy under the rule of the pope. The {144} struggle was a political one, just as the a.s.sumption of power by the popes, of power over the country and a considerable district around it, was a political act.

The popes had but very slight relations with the kings of the Merwing house. It was different when the Karlings came into power. Zacharias, both directly and through S. Boniface, came into close connection with Pippin and Carloman. At first he was concerned simply with reform in the Frankish Church, but before long he found himself able to intervene in a critical event and to take part in the inauguration of the Karling House, the revival as it claimed to be of the Empire in the West.

[Sidenote: The Karling reformation.]

The growth of the papal power was closely a.s.sociated with two other historic events: the growth of the Karling house among the Franks, and the process of revival in the Church's spiritual activity, showing itself in missions without and reforms within. The last leads back to the first.

Whatever may be thought of the Karling reformation, it cannot be denied that for the century before Charles a.s.sumed the Imperial crown the Church showed many signs of corruption. The darkness of the picture is relieved only by the lives of some remarkable saints.

[Sidenote: The Karling House.]

The first, of course, is S. Arnulf, Bishop of Metz, the great-grandfather of Charles Martel. Born about 582, he died in 641, and the holy simplicity of his life as statesman and priest comes like a ray of suns.h.i.+ne in the gloom of the days of "half heathen and wholly vicious" kings. Mr. Hodgkin, with an eye no doubt to modern affairs, comments thus on the career of the prelate so different from the greedy, turbulent, and licentious men whom {145} Gregory of Tours describes: "In reading his life one cannot but feel that in some way the Frankish nation, or at least the Austrasian part of it, has groped its way upwards since the sixth century." [Sidenote: S. Arnulf.] Arnulf was a type of the good bishops of the Middle Ages, strong, able to hold his own with kings, a friend of the poor, eager to pa.s.s from the world to a quiet eventide in some monastic shade. The tale that is told of him is typical of the sympathies and pa.s.sions of his age. Bishop of Metz, and chief counsellor of Dagobert whose father Chlothochar he had helped to raise to the throne, when he expressed his wish to retire from the world the king cried out that if he did he would slay his two sons. "My sons' lives are in the hands of G.o.d," said Arnulf. "Yours will not last long if you slay the innocent"; and when Dagobert drew his sword on him he said, "Would you return good for evil? Here am I ready to die in obedience to Him Who gave me life and Who died for me."

Queen and n.o.bles cried out, and the king fell penitent at the bishop's feet. Like S. Arnulf's is the romantic figure of his descendant Carloman, who turned from the rule of kingdoms and the command of armies to the seclusion of Soracte and Monte Ca.s.sino. The "great renunciation" is a striking tale. The disappearance, the long days of patient submission to rule, the discovery of the real position of the humble brother, and then the last dramatic appearance to follow an unpopular cause, make a story as striking as any which have come to us from the Middle Age. But before Carloman come many other n.o.ble figures. The fifty years that followed Arnulf's death are but a dreary tale of anarchy and blood. It is broken here and there {146} by records of Christian endurance or martyrdom: bishops who tried to serve the State often served not wisely but too well and met the fate of unsuccessful political leaders. Leodegar, Bishop of Autun, who helped Ebroin to raise Theoderic III to the throne of Neustria, was blinded, imprisoned and at length put to death and appears in the Church's calendar as S. Leger.

The crisis came when the long march of the successful Muhammadans was stayed by the arms of S. Arnulf's descendant Charles Martel, mayor of the palace to the King of Austrasia 717, to all the kingdoms from 719, who lived till 741. In 711 the Wisigothic monarchy of Spain had fallen before the infidels: in 720 the Moors entered Gaul. From then to 731 there was for Abder Rahman an almost unbroken triumph. The power of the Prophet reached from Damascus to beyond the Pyrenees. Then Charles Martel came to the relief of Southern Gaul, and on an October Sunday in 732 the hosts of Islam were utterly routed at Poictiers by the soldiers of the Cross. [Sidenote: The defeat of the Saracens.] It was a great deliverance; and there is no wonder that imagination has exaggerated its importance and thought that but for the Moorish defeat there might to-day be a muezzin in every Highland steeple and an Imam set over every Oxford college. Charles had still to reconquer Septimania and Provence. Arles and Nimes, the great Roman cities, had to be recovered from the Arabs who had seized them, and Avignon, Agde, Beziers, cities whose future was as wonderful as was the others' past, were also won back by the arms of the Christian chief.

Charles died in 741. He had refused to help Pope {147} Gregory III. in 739 against the Lombards. It was reserved for his son Pippin to make that alliance between the papacy and the Karling house which dictated the future of Europe. [Sidenote: Pippin.] To Pippin came the lords.h.i.+p of the West Franks, to Carloman his brother that of the East Franks, when their father died. They conquered, they reformed the Church among the Franks, with the aid of Boniface, and then came that dramatic retirement of Carloman in 747 which showed him to be true heir of S.

Arnulf. Four years later the house of the Karlings became the nominal as well as the real rulers of the Franks. In 751 the bishop of Wurzburg for the East Franks, and the abbat of S. Denis for those of the West, went to Rome to ask the pope's advice. Were the wretched Merwings "who were of royal race and were called kings but had no power in the realm save that grants and charters were drawn up in their names" to be still called kings, for "what willed the _major domus_ of the Franks, that they did?" Zacharias answered as a wise man would, that he who had the power should bear the name. And so, blessed by the great missionary S. Boniface, Pippin was "heaved" on the s.h.i.+eld, and became king of the Franks, and Childerich, the last of the Merwings, went to a distant monastery to end his days.

[Sidenote: The end of the Imperial power in Italy.]

But this was only a beginning. The pope was threatened by the barbarians, neglected by the emperors who reigned at Constantinople, and at last was in actual conflict with those who tried to impose Iconoclasm upon the Church. In 751 the exarchate, the representation of the Imperial power in Italy, with its seat at Ravenna, was overwhelmed by the {148} arms of Aistulf, the Lombard king. The time had come, thought Pope Stephen II. (752-7), when the distant barbarians, now orthodox, should be called to save the patrimony of S.