An Introduction to the History of Western Europe Part 6

[Sidenote: The regular and secular clergy.]

The Benedictine monks, as well as later monastic orders, were ardent and faithful supporters of the papacy. The Roman Church, which owes much to them, appreciated the aid which they might furnish and extended to them many of the privileges enjoyed by the clergy. Indeed the monks were reckoned as clergymen and were called the "regular" clergy because they lived according to a _regula_, or rule, to distinguish them from the "secular" clergy, who continued to live in the world (_saeculum_) and took no monastic vows.

[Sidenote: Monks and secular clergy supplement each other.]

The Church, ever anxious to maintain as far-reaching a control over its subjects as that of the Roman Empire, whose power it inherited, could hardly expect its busy officers, with their multiform duties and constant relations with men, to represent the ideal of contemplative Christianity which was then held in higher esteem than the active life.

The secular clergy performed the ceremonies of the Church, administered its business, and guarded its property, while the regular clergy ill.u.s.trated the necessity of personal piety and self-denial. Monasticism at its best was a monitor standing beside the Church and constantly warning it against permitting the Christian life to sink into mere mechanical and pa.s.sive acceptance of its ceremonies as all-sufficient for salvation. It supplied the element of personal responsibility and spiritual ambition upon which Protestantism has laid so much stress.

[Sidenote: The monks as missionaries.]

22. The first great service of the monks was their missionary labors. To these the later strength of the Roman Church is in no small degree due, for the monks made of the unconverted Germans not merely Christians, but also dutiful subjects of the pope. The first people to engage their attention were the heathen Germans who had conquered the once Christian Britain.

[Sidenote: Early Britain.]

The islands which are now known as the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were, at the opening of the Christian era, occupied by several Celtic peoples of whose customs and religion we know almost nothing.

Julius Caesar commenced the conquest of the islands (55 B.C.); but the Romans never succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng their power beyond the wall which they built, from the Clyde to the Firth of Forth, to keep out the wild Celtic tribes of the North. Even south of the wall the country was not completely Romanized, and the Celtic tongue has actually survived down to the present day in Wales.

[Sidenote: Saxons and Angles conquer Britain.]

At the opening of the fifth century the barbarian invasions forced Rome to withdraw its legions from Britain in order to protect its frontiers on the continent. The island was thus left to be gradually conquered by the Germans, mainly Saxons and Angles, who came across the North Sea from the region south of Denmark. Almost all record of what went on during the two centuries following the departure of the Romans has disappeared. No one knows the fate of the original Celtic inhabitants of England. It is unlikely that they were, as was formerly supposed, all killed or driven to the mountain districts of Wales. More probably they were gradually lost among the dominating Germans with whom they merged into one people. The Saxon and Angle chieftains established petty kingdoms, of which there were seven or eight at the time when Gregory the Great became pope.

[Sidenote: Conversion of Britain.]

Gregory, while still a simple monk, had been struck with the beauty of some Angles whom he saw one day in the slave market of Rome. When he learned who they were he was grieved that such handsome beings should still belong to the kingdom of the Prince of Darkness, and, had he been permitted, he himself would have gone as a missionary to their people.

Upon becoming pope he sent forty monks to England from one of the monasteries that he had founded, placing a prior, Augustine, at their head and designating him in advance as Bishop of England. The heathen king of Kent, in whose territory the monks landed with fear and trembling (597), had a Christian wife, the daughter of a Frankish king.

Through her influence the monks were kindly received and were a.s.signed an ancient church at Canterbury, dating from the Roman occupation before the German invasions. Here they established a monastery, and from this center the conversion, first of Kent and then of the whole island, was gradually effected. Canterbury has always maintained its early preeminence and may still be considered the religious capital of England.[33]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ancient Church of St. Martin's, Canterbury]

[Sidenote: The Irish monks.]

Augustine and his monks were not, however, the only Christians in the British Isles. Britain had been converted to Christianity when it was a Roman province, and some of the missionaries, led by St. Patrick (d.

about 469), had made their way into Ireland and established a center of Christianity there. When the Germans overran Britain and reheathenized it, the Irish monks and clergy were too far off to be troubled by the barbarians. They knew little of the traditions of the Roman Church and diverged from its customs in some respects. They celebrated Easter upon a different date from that observed by the Roman Church and employed a different style of tonsure. Missionaries from this Irish church were busy converting the northern regions of Britain, when the Roman monks under Augustine began their work in the southern part of the island.

[Sidenote: Conflict between the Roman Church and the Irish monks.]

There was sure to be trouble between the two parties. The Irish clergy, while they professed great respect for the pope and did not wish to be cut off from the rest of the Christian Church, were unwilling to abandon their peculiar usages and accept those sanctioned by Rome. Nor would they recognize as their superior the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom the pope had made the head of the British church. The pope, on his part, felt that it was all-important that these isolated Christians should become a part of the great organization of which he claimed to be the head. Neither party would make any concessions, and for two generations each went its own way, cheris.h.i.+ng a bitter hostility toward the other.

[Sidenote: Victory of Roman Church.]

At last the Roman Church won the victory, as it so often did in later struggles. In 664, through the influence of the king of Northumbria who did not wish to risk being on bad terms with the pope, the Roman Catholic form of faith was solemnly recognized in an a.s.sembly at Whitby, and the leader of the Irish missionaries sadly withdrew to Ireland.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of Christian Missions]

The king of Northumbria, upon opening the Council of Whitby, said "that it was proper that those who served one G.o.d should observe one rule of conduct and not depart from one another in the ways of celebrating the holy mysteries, since they all hoped for the same kingdom of heaven."

That a remote island of Europe should set up its traditions against the customs sanctioned by the rest of Christendom appeared to him highly unreasonable. This faith in the necessary unity of the Church is one of the secrets of its strength. England became a part of the ever-growing territory embraced in the Catholic Church and remained as faithful to the pope as any other Catholic country, down to the defection of Henry VIII in the early part of the sixteenth century.

[Sidenote: Early culture in England.]

[Sidenote: The Venerable Bede.]

The consolidation of the rival churches in Great Britain was followed by a period of general enthusiasm for Rome and its literature and culture.

Lindisfarne, Wearmouth, and other English monasteries became centers of learning unrivaled perhaps in the rest of Europe. A constant intercourse was maintained with Rome. Masons and gla.s.smakers were brought across the Channel to replace the wooden churches of Britain by stone edifices in the style of the Romans. The young clergy were taught Latin and sometimes Greek. Copies of the ancient cla.s.sics were brought from the continent and reproduced. The most distinguished man of letters of the seventh and early eighth centuries was the English monk Baeda (often called The Venerable Bede, 673-735), from whose admirable history of the Church in England most of our information about the period is derived.[34]

[Sidenote: Irish missionaries on the continent.]

[Sidenote: St. Columban and St. Gall.]

23. From England missionaries carried the enthusiasm for the Church back across the Channel. In spite of the conversion of Clovis and the wholesale baptism of his soldiers, the Franks, especially those farthest north, had been very imperfectly Christianized. A few years before Augustine landed in Kent, St. Columban, one of the Irish missionaries of whom we have spoken, landed in Gaul. He went from place to place founding monasteries and gaining the respect of the people by his rigid self-denial and by the miracles that he performed. He even penetrated among the still wholly pagan Alemanni about the Lake of Constance. When driven away by their pagan king, he turned his attention to the Lombards in northern Italy, where he died in 615.[35] St. Gall, one of his followers, remained near the Lake of Constance and attracted about him so many disciples and companions that a great monastery grew up which was named after him and became one of the most celebrated in central Europe. Other Irish missionaries penetrated into the forests of Thuringia and Bavaria. The German church looks back, however, to an English missionary as its real founder.

[Sidenote: St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans.]

In 718, about a hundred years after the death of St. Columban, St.

Boniface, an English monk, was sent by the pope as an apostle to the Germans. After four years spent in reconnoitering the field of his future labors, he returned to Rome and was made a missionary bishop, taking the same oath of obedience to the pope that the bishops in the immediate vicinity of Rome were accustomed to take. Indeed absolute subordination to the pope was a part of Boniface's religion, and he became a powerful agent in promoting the supremacy of the Roman see.

Under the protection of the powerful Frankish mayor of the palace, Charles Martel, Boniface carried on his missionary work with such zeal that he succeeded in bringing all the older Christian communities which had been established by the Irish missionaries under the papal control, as well as in converting many of the more remote German tribes who still clung to their old pagan beliefs. His energetic methods are ill.u.s.trated by the story of how he cut down the sacred oak of Odin at Fritzlar, in Hesse, and used the wood to build a chapel, around which a monastery soon grew up. In 732 Boniface was raised to the dignity of Archbishop of Mayence and proceeded to establish, in the newly converted region, the German bishoprics of Salzburg, Regensburg, Wurzburg, Erfurt, and several others; this gives us some idea of the geographical extent of his labors.

[Sidenote: Boniface reforms the church in Gaul and brings it into subjection to the pope.]

After organizing the German church he turned his attention, with the hearty approval of the pope and the support of the Frankish rulers, to a general reformation of the church in Gaul. Here the clergy were sadly demoralized, and the churches and monasteries had been despoiled of much of their property in the constant turmoil of the time. Boniface succeeded, with the help of Charles Martel, in bettering affairs, and through his efforts the venerable church of Gaul, almost as old as that of Rome itself, was brought under the supremacy of the pope. In 748 the a.s.sembled bishops of Gaul bound themselves to maintain the Catholic unity of faith and follow strictly the precepts of the vicar of St.

Peter, the pope, so that they might be reckoned among Peter's sheep.

General Reading.--The best history of the monks to be had in English is MONTALEMBERT, _The Monks of the West from St. Benedict to St. Bernard_ (Longmans, Green & Co., 6 vols., $15.00). The writer's enthusiasm and his excellent style make his work very attractive. The advanced student will gain much from TAYLOR, _Cla.s.sical Heritage of the Middle Ages_ (The Macmillan Company, $1.75), Chapter VII, on the origin and spirit of monasticism. See also HARNACK, _Monasticism_ (Scribners, 50 cents). The works on church history referred to at the end of the preceding chapter all contain some account of the monks.

CHAPTER VI

CHARLES MARTEL AND PIPPIN

[Sidenote: Charles Martel, Frankish mayor of the palace, 714-741.]

24. Just as the pope was becoming the acknowledged head of the Western Church, the Frankish realms came successively under the rule of two great statesmen, Charles Martel and his son Pippin the Short, who laid the foundation of Charlemagne's vast empire.

[Sidenote: Difficulty of holding together a kingdom in the early Middle Ages.]

The difficulties which Charles Martel had to face were much the same as those which for centuries to follow confronted the sovereigns of western Europe. The great problem of the mediaeval ruler was to make his power felt throughout his whole territory in spite of the many rich and ambitious officials, bishops, and abbots who eagerly took advantage of all the king's weaknesses and embarra.s.sments to make themselves practically supreme in their respective districts.

[Sidenote: Origin of counts and dukes.]

The two cla.s.ses of officers of which we hear most were the counts (Latin, _comites_) and the dukes (Latin, _duces_). A count ordinarily represented the king within the district comprised in an old munic.i.p.ality of the Empire. Over a number of counts the king might place a duke. Both of these t.i.tles were borrowed by the Germans from the names of Roman officials. While the king appointed, and might dismiss, these officers when he pleased, there was a growing tendency for them to hold their positions for life.

We find Charles fighting the dukes of Aquitaine, Bavaria, and Alemannia, each of whom was endeavoring to make the territory which he was deputed to rule in the king's interest a separate and independent country under his own supremacy. By successive campaigns against these rebellious magnates, Charles succeeded in reuniting all those outlying districts that tended to forget or ignore their connection with the Frankish empire.

[Sidenote: Charles and his bishops.]