From Charles the Great, by Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897; pp. 207-231.
CHAPTER XII
Old Age
The somewhat tedious tale of the wars of the August and Pacific Emperor is happily almost at an end.
We hear of repeated ravages by Scandinavian pirates along the shores of the German and Atlantic oceans: by Moorish pirates along the shore of the Mediterranean: and with neither class of freebooters does Charles appear to have grappled very successfully, for the good reason that he never devoted a sufficient portion of his energies to the establishment of a navy. The well-known story that Charles saw from the windows of his palace at Narbonne the Danish sea-rovers scudding over the waters of the Gulf of Lyons, and foretold with tears the miseries which these freebooters should bring upon his posterity and their realm, comes to us on the late and doubtful authority of the Monk of St. Gall and need not be accepted as authentic history: but that was one of the thunderclouds looming up on the horizon of the ninth century whether Charles was ware of it or no. While the pirate barks of the Scandinavians were spreading terror over the islands of the west, the land forces of the King of Denmark were threatening the 208 north-eastern boundary of Charles’s kingdom. Here the Saxons, at last subdued into loyalty, were, as we have seen, bounded on the east by the Sclavonic nations, the Abodrites, and the Wiltzi, and on the north, in Sleswik, by the Danes. The usual arrangement of parties in the perpetually recurring frontier wars was this: the Saxons (that is the Frankish kingdom) in alliance with the Abodrites on one side, and the Danes with the Wiltzi on the other. The king of the Abodrites was named Drasko; the king of the Danes was Godofrid, a proud, high-soaring king of pirates, who ventured to put himself on an equality with the mighty Frankish Emperor, declaring that Friesland and Saxon-land were of right his territories, and that he would appear one day with all his warriors round him at Aachen and would try conclusions with Charles.
It was in the years 808 to 810 that this menace to the tranquillity of the Frankish kingdom showed itself in its most alarming shape. In the first of those years Godofrid invaded the territory of the Abodrites and ravaged their lands. Drasko fled before him, but another chieftain, Godelaib, was treacherously taken and hung. The Wiltzi joined forces with the Danes: and after much slaughter on both sides (for the flower of the Danish nobility fell in this campaign), the Abodrites were made subject to tribute to the Danish king. In retaliation for this onslaught on a friendly tribe, the younger Charles was sent across the Elbe with an army, but though he ravaged the lands of some Sclavonic allies of the Danes he seems to have returned home without achieving any decisive victory. Then both the two chief powers, knowing that a war of 209 reprisals was imminent, took to fortifying their frontier. Godofrid drew across Holstein that line of forts which has since become famous as the Dannewerk, and Charles erected fortresses on his side of the border, especially restoring the stronghold of Hohbuoki which had been destroyed by the Wiltzi.
Next year (809) Godofrid sought and obtained an interview with Charles at Badenfliot (in Holstein), desiring to exculpate himself from the charge of having provoked the previous war. But the interview came to nothing. The Danish king did not sincerely desire peace, and probably showed too plainly the arrogance of his ignorant soul and his foolish pretensions to equality with Charles. He succeeded, however, in patching up a temporary peace with the Abodrite chief Drasko who returned to his own land, but only to fall a victim some months later to the treacherous attack of a vassal of Godofrid’s, who was believed to have been incited to the deed by the Danish king. In 810 the contest seemed to be growing desperate, and the wild hopes of Godofrid to be approaching fulfilment. A fleet of two hundred Danish ships sailed to Friesland, laid waste all the multitudinous islands on the Frisian shore, and landed an army on the mainland, which defeated the Frisians in three pitched battles and laid upon them a tribute, of which 100 lbs. of silver had been already paid when tidings of the disaster reached the emperor in his palace at Aachen. He at once set about the too long delayed construction of a fleet: and at the mouths of all the rivers which poured into the German Ocean, the Channel, and the Atlantic, the sound of the shipbuilder’s hammer was heard. Then in the midst of his 210 anxieties he received two welcome pieces of intelligence. The first was that the Danish fleet had returned home: the second that Godofrid was dead, murdered by one of his vassals, a fitting retribution for the assassination of Drasko, which he himself had instigated.
After this there was peace for the rest of Charles’s life between him and the Danes. Hemming, the nephew and successor of Godofrid, was not strong enough to continue the aggressive policy of his uncle, and on Hemming’s death (812) there was a bloody civil war between his family and the rival dynasty of Harald. However, Charles wisely did not relax his naval preparations, but in the year 811 repaired to Boulogne in order to review the fleet which he had commanded to be assembled there from the various estuaries of his kingdom. Was it partly in remembrance of this event, that nearly a thousand years later, Napoleon, that great imitator of Charlemagne, caused his flotilla to assemble at Boulogne for the long meditated, never accomplished invasion of Britain?
The last years of the great emperor’s life were saddened by a succession of domestic afflictions: but before describing them it will be well to give a glance at his family life in his happier middle age before these troubles fell upon him. As we have seen, Charles was five times married. Of his first wife Himiltrud, mother of the hunchback Pippin, we know nothing, save that, according to Pope Stephen’s account, she was “sprung from the very noble race of the Franks,” and that she must have her died or been divorced before 770, when he married the daughter of the Lombard king, who is by one writer called Desiderata, and by another 211 Bertrada. She bore him no children, and on her divorce after something less than a year of matrimony, Charles married Hildegard, a noble Swabian lady, the best beloved of all his wives. Her life, though splendid, was not an easy one. She was only thirteen years old when she married the Frankish hero who was verging on thirty: she accompanied him on his campaigns and pilgrimages: she bore him nine children, and after twelve or thirteen years of wedlock she died on the 30th of April 783, and was buried at Metz in the chapel of St. Arnulf, her husband’s revered ancestor. From this marriage sprang all the three sons, Charles, Pippin, Louis, among whom Charlemagne hoped to divide his kingdom, also another son who died in infancy, and five daughters. The eldest of these daughters was that princess Hrotrud who learned Greek of Elissæus, and who so narrowly missed sharing the Byzantine throne.
A few months after the death of Hildegard, Charles married (about October 783) Fastrada, daughter of the Austrasian count, Radolf, with whom he shared eleven years of married life, and whose baneful influence on his character and conduct is described to us by Einhard. She bore him two daughters (both of whom eventually became abbesses) but no son, and died on the 10th of August 794, shortly after the great council of Frankfurt.
Not many years after Fastrada’s death Charles married his fifth wife, the Alamannian Liutgard, who had previously lived with him as his concubine, and who died on the 4th of June 800, a few months too soon to wear the title of Empress. We are not told of any issue of this marriage, the last legal union which Charles contracted — the magnificent scheme of a marriage alliance 212 with Irene having never been realised. We hear, however, of four additional concubines and several illegitimate children, some of whom rose to high honours in the Church.
The home which the great emperor favoured above all others was that city which his love alone made eminent, though he did not absolutely found it, the city which the Romans called Aquisgranum, which the Germans now call Aachen, and the French Aix-la-Chapelle. Here, on the southern slope of the Lousberg hills, in the pleasant land between Rhine and Meuse, Charles made the dwelling-place of his old age. With all his wide, far-reaching schemes he remained, it would seem, at heart a Ripuarian Frank — Ripuarian not Salian — and we may conjecture that Neustria was to him as little of a homeland as Aquitaine or even Italy. The river Rhine with its great bordering bishoprics, Mainz, Köln, Trier, and its grand Romanesque churches, bore for centuries the character which it had received from the greatest of its sons, the friend alike of Hadrian the Pope and of Alcuin the scholar: and, if not on the banks of the Rhine, at least in the near neighbourhood of Rhine-land it was fitting that Charles should die. Doubtless the nature-heated baths which had been known since the time of Severus Alexander, and which are said to have been named from Apollo Granus, were the chief determining causes which led Charles to visit the place, at which indeed his father Pippin had kept Christmas and Easter as long ago as 765. But having visited it, and probably derived benefit from the waters, he evidently became more and more attached to the place. We first hear of Charles keeping his Christmas 213 there in 788: but after that the name is of frequent recurrence in the Annals till at last Worms and Frankfurt which had before been his favourite abiding-places are almost entirely superseded, and “Imperator celebravit natalem Domini Aquisgrani,” becomes the regular formula of the chronicles.
Here, then, at Aachen, Charles built himself a lordly palace and a church, joined together by a colonnade. For both these structures he or his architect, Master Odo, borrowed the plan of Ravenna; the palace being built after the pattern of Theodoric’s palace, and the church, which was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, being a copy of that dedicated to San Vitale. Nor was the plan the only thing which was borrowed. Columns and marble tablets were brought from Rome as well as from Ravenna. The mosaics from Theodoric’s palace and the equestrian statue in gilded bronze of the great Ostrogoth — a work apparently of more artistic merit than most of the productions of the sixth century — were all carried off from the city on the Ronco to adorn the Belgic palace of the new emperor. Near the palace was a wide-stretching forest surrounded with walls, full of game, resounding with the song of birds and watered by the little stream of the Worm.
Of all these materials of the great emperor probably nothing now remains but the church. The deer-park has doubtless long since disappeared: of the palace all that can be said is that the Rathhaus is built upon its site: but the Capella in Palatio still stands, and is included in the much later building which is known as the Münster. It is about 100 feet high and 50 feet in diameter, surmounted by an octagonal cupola and 214 surrounded by a sixteen-sided cloister. The resemblance to San Vitale at once strikes the visitor who is acquainted with the churches of Ravenna.
It was certainly a triumphant era for the Frankish nation — still one, not yet fallen asunder into diverse and hostile nationalities — when the embassies of mighty kings from east and west trod the streets of the little city in Rhine-land which their ruler, sprung, not from a long line of kings but from a family of Austrasian nobles, had made the seat of his empire. Thither came swarthy Saracens from Bagdad, ambassadors from the court —
Of Haround, for whose name by blood defiled,
Genius hath wrought salvation.
Common enmities (for they both were hostile to the Ommayad Caliphs and the eastern emperors), drew together these two men whose names for so long were dear to the story-tellers of east and west, Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid. Haround sent to Charles in 807 some sort of message or letter confirming the act of the Patriarch of Jerusalem which by the surrender of the keys constituted him guardian of the Holy Places. Some years before he had sent, besides other rich and costly presents, one which specially impressed the minds of the Franks, an enormous elephant named Abu-l-Abbas. Under the guidance of its keeper, Isaac the Jew, the elephant safely reached Aachen, where it abode for eight years. In the year 810 it was taken across the Rhine, apparently that its great strength might be made use of in the expected campaign against Godofrid the Dane; and its sudden death at Lippeham in Westphalia 215 is solemnly recorded by the chroniclers among the memorable events of that melancholy year.
It was in this same year, in the month of October, that the emperor saw with pride two embassies from east and west, meet at his court. The long delayed overtures for reconciliation from the Emperor Nicephorus were brought by the one, and proposals for a treaty of peace with El Hakem the Cruel, Emir of Cordova, were brought by the other embassy and graciously accepted by Charles.
Nor was our own island unrepresented among the embassies which visited the Frankish Court. With Offa of Mercia, most powerful of English kings before the rise of Ecgbert, the relations were not altogether friendly. A treaty for the marriage of the younger Charles with the daughter of Offa broke down (789), it is said, because of Offa’s counter-proposal on behalf of his son for the hand of Charles’s daughter Bertha. Some passages in this abortive “double marriage negociation” so annoyed the Frankish king that English merchants were forbidden to land on the shores of Gaul. However, though no marriage was brought to pass, friendly relations between the two kings were restored, perhaps through the mediation of Offa’s subject, Alcuin; and in 796 when the great Hring of the Avars had been despoiled by Eric of Friuli, an Avar sword was graciously sent by Charles as a present to the King of Mercia.
It was not at Aachen but at Nimeguen on the Rhine that another English king, driven from his realm by revolution, Eardulf of Northumberland, visited Charles’s court in 808 and besought his aid to restore him to his throne. Charles seems to have embraced his cause and 216 sent him on to Rome with a letter of recommendation to Pope Leo whose help was needed, as the Archbishop of York had taken an active part in Eardulf’s deposition. With the help of emperor and pope, Fardulf was restored (809) to a throne which he seems to have justly forfeited by various acts of tyranny; but the reign of the restored king was of short duration.
It may be permitted to conjecture that the happiest period of the life of Charles consisted of the fifteen years which he spent mainly at Aachen between 795 and 810. The Saxon and Avar wars were drawing to a close, his labours for the reform of the Church and for the spread of learning were bearing manifest fruit; the haughty and difficult-tempered Fastrada was dead, and his children, whom he loved with fondness not often found in palaces, were growing up around him. The few words in which Einhard sketches his family life give one an impression of joyous magnificence not unlike that which the poets have feigned concerning the purely imaginary court of King Arthur: —
“He determined so to bring up his children that all, both sons and daughters, should be well grounded in liberal studies, to which he himself also gave earnest attention. Moreover, he caused his sons as soon as they were of the proper age to learn to ride after the manner of the Franks, to be trained to war and the chase: but his daughters he ordered to learn the spinning of wool, to give heed to the spindle and distaff, that they might not grow slothful through ease, but be trained to all kinds of honest industry. . . .
“So great was the attention which he paid to the education of his sons and daughters that when he was 217 at home he would never sup without them; when he journeyed they must accompany him, the sons riding by his side and the daughters following a little behind, while a band of servants appointed for this purpose brought up the rear. As for these daughters, though they were of great beauty and were dearly loved by him, strange to say he never gave one of them in marriage either to a man of his own nation or to a foreigner, but he kept them all with him in his own house till his death, saying that he could not dispense with their company. On this account, prosperous as he was in other ways, he experienced the unkindness of adverse fortune, as to which, however, he so skilfully dissembled that no one would suppose that any suspicion of a stain on their fair fame had ever reached his ears.”
This last sentence of Charles’s usually enthusiastic biographer hints at court scandals which could not be always concealed, and the results of some of which appear in the Carolingian pedigrees. But the previous statement concerning his unwillingness to have his merry family circle broken in upon by the unwelcome claims of a son-in-law, may possibly help to explain what has perplexed us in the rupture of the matrimonial treaty with Byzantium or even with the King of Mercia. Instead of seeking for deep state-reasons of policy for these failures, we ought, perhaps, simply to see in them the pardonable weakness of a father who, when the crisis came, gave more heed to the voice of family affection than to the maxims of state-craft.
A notice of Charles’s home life would be incomplete without some allusion to the circle of friends by whom he was surrounded, and whom he seems to have inspired 218 with a genuine love for himself as a man, apart from their loyalty to him as sovereign.
The great ecclesiastics who, under the name of Arch-chaplains, held a place similar to that of a modern prime minister, Fulrad, Abbot of St. Denis, who had been chaplain to his father and who died in 784; his successor Angilram, Bishop of Metz, who died while accompanying Charles on his Avar campaign in 791; Hidibald, Archbishop of Cologne, who stood by the emperor’s death-bed: all these men, though highly trusted and able servants, have not left many evidences by which we can judge of their individual characters. Much more interesting is Charles’s relation to the men of letters whom he delighted to gather around him. Chief among these were Alcuin, Peter of Pisa, Paul the Lombard, and Einhard.
Of Alcuin, who might truly be called Charles’s literary prime minister, no more need be said, save that he died at Tours in 804, full of years and in unclouded friendship with the emperor.
It was apparently about the year 780 that Peter of Pisa, a deacon who had once taught in the Lombard capital, Pavia, and had there held a celebrated disputation with a Jew named Lullus, came to Charles’s court. He was then an old man. Grammar was his main subject, and Charles regularly attended his lectures. The date of his death is uncertain, but it was before the year 799.
Paul the Lombard, generally known as Paulus Diaconus, probably made Charles’s acquaintance during his second visit to Italy (780-781). At any rate, somewhere about the year 782 he followed Charles across the 219 Alps, and was for some two or three years in pretty close attendance at the Frankish court. The main object of his journey was to obtain pardon and the restitution of confiscated property for his brother Arichis who, as has been already stated, seems to have been involved in the rebellion of Duke Hrodgaud, and was carried captive into Frank-land, leaving his wife and children destitute. There can be little doubt that the pardon of Arichis was granted to the intercession of his brother, for whom Charles seems to have conceived an especial affection. An amusing but fearfully perplexing series of poems exists, in which enigmas, compliments, and good-natured banter are exchanged between the king, Paulus Diaconus, and Petrus Pisanus. At dawn of day a trim young courtier with a hopeful little beard brings to Peter the grammarian a riddle which the king has thought of in the night and desires him to guess it. In despair Peter turns to Paul begging for his aid. In a hexameter poem of forty-seven lines (all the correspondence is in verse) Paul gives his version of the answer, which, if correct, certainly proves the riddle to have been a very foolish one. At another time the king poetically asks Paul which of three penalties he would prefer — to be crushed under an immense weight of iron, to be doomed to lie in a gloomy dungeon-cave, or to be sent to convert and baptize Sigfrid who “wields the impious sceptre of pestilential Denmark.” Paul replies in a strain of enthusiastic devotion that he will do anything which the king desires him to do, but that as he knows no Danish he will seem like a brute beast when he stands in the presence of the barbarian king. Yet would he have no fear for his own safety if he undertook 220 the journey: for if Sigfrid knew that he was one of Charles’s subjects, so great is his dread of the Frankish king that he would not dare to touch his little finger. And so on through many hexameter and pentameter verses. A harsh critic might describe the whole correspondence as “gracious fooling,” but in view of the hard and toilsome life of the slayer and converter of so many Saxons, it is a consolation to find that he had leisure and spare brain-power even for occasional nonsense.
Paulus Diaconus, after a few years’ sojourn at the Frankish court, returned to Italy to the shelter of his beloved convent of Monte Cassino, where he died, probably in one of the closing years of the eighth century. We are indebted to him, not only for his well-known Historia Langobardorum — almost the only record of the history of Italy from 568 to 744 — but also for a book on the Gesta Episcoporum Mettensium which gives us valuable information as to the lives of the early Arnulfings.
The last of Charles’s literary courtiers who can be noticed here is Einhard or (as his name is commonly but less correctly written) Eginhard. This man, who was born near the time of Charles’s accession to the kingdom, and who survived him about thirty years, was the son of Einhard and Engilfrita, persons of good birth and station who dwelt in Franconia near the Odenwald. He was educated in the monastery of Fulda, and came as a young man to the Frankish court, where his nimbleness of mind, his learning and his skill in the administration of affairs so recommended him to Charles that for the remaining twenty years or more of 221 his reign the little Franconian — he was a man of conspicuously short stature — was the great king’s inseparable companion. His skill in all manner of metal work earned for him in that name-giving circle of friends the name of Bezaleel, by which he is pleasantly alluded to in one of Alcuin’s letters. He was employed to superintend some of Charles’s great architectural works: notably the palace and basilica at Aachen, the palace at Ingelheim and the great bridge over the Rhine at Mainz. A twelfth-century chronicler connected his name unpleasantly with that of one of the daughters of Charles: but for this scandal there does not seem to be the slightest foundation. None of Charles’s daughters was named Emma, the name attributed to the alleged mistress, afterwards wife, of Einhard. His real wife appears to have been Emma, sister of Bernhard, Bishop of Worms. About the year 826 he and his wife parted by mutual consent and “gave themselves to religion.” He was ordained priest and retired to the monastery of Seligenstadt on the Main where he died about the year 840.
Einhard had a share (how large is a subject of constant discussion), in the composition of the official Annals which are our most trustworthy authority for the history of his master’s reign. But we are far more indebted to him for his short tract De Vitâ Caroli Magni from which several extracts have already been made. In this life there is an evident ambition on the part of the writer, who calls himself “a barbarian little skilled in Roman speech” to follow the example of the great classical authors. His imitation, especially, of the Life of Augustus by Suetonius, is almost servile, and provokes 222 much laughter on the part of modern scholars; but however he may be derided, the fact remains that almost all our real, vivifying knowledge of Charles the Great is derived from Einhard, and that the Vita Caroli Magni is one of the most precious literary bequests of the early Middle Ages.
Here are some features of the picture of his master by Einhard which have not been copied in the preceding pages: —
“This king, whose prudence and magnanimity surpassed that of all contemporary princes, never shunned on account of toil, nor declined on account of danger, any enterprise which had to be begun or carried through to its end; but having learned to bear every burden as it came, according to its true weight, he would neither yield under adversity, nor in prosperity trust the flattering smiles of fortune.”
“He loved foreigners and took the greatest pains to entertain them, so that their number often seemed a real burden, not only to the palace but even to the realm. But he, on account of his greatness of soul, refused to worry himself over this burden, thinking that even great inconveniences were amply compensated by the praise of his liberality and the reward of his renown.”
“His gait was firm, all the habit of his body manly: his voice clear, but scarce corresponding to his stature: his health good, except that during the last four years of his life he was often attacked by fever, and at the last he limped with one foot. Moreover he guided himself much more by his own fancy than by the counsel of his physicians, whom he almost hated because they tried to 223 persuade him to give up roast meats, to which he was accustomed, and to take to boiled. He kept up diligently his exercises of riding and hunting, wherein he followed the usage of his nation, for scarcely any other race equals the Franks herein. He delighted, too, in the steam of nature-heated baths being a frequent and skilful swimmer, so that hardly any one excelled him in this exercise. This was his reason for building his palace at Aquisgranum where he spent the latter years of his life up to his death. And not only did he invite his sons to the bath, but also his friends and the nobles, sometimes even a crowd of henchmen and bodyguards, so that at times as many as a hundred men or more would be bathing there together.”
“He was temperate in food and drink, especially the latter, since he held drunkenness in any man, but most of all in himself and his friends, in the highest abhorrence. He was not so well able to abstain from food, and used often to complain that the fasts [of the Church] were hurtful to his body. He very seldom gave banquets, and those only on the chief festivals, but then he invited a very large number of guests. His daily supper was served with four courses only, except the roast, which the huntsmen used to bring in on spits, and which he partook of more willingly than of any other food. During supper he listened either to music or to the reading of some book, generally histories and accounts of the things done by the ancients. He delighted also in the writings of St. Augustine, especially that one which is entitled Dei Civitate Dei. He was so chary of drinking wine or liquor of any kind, that he seldom drank more than three times at supper. In summer, after his mid-day 224 meal, he would take some fruit and would drink once, and then laying aside his raiment and his shoes, just as he was wont to do at night, he would rest for two or three hours. At night his sleep used to be interrupted, not only by awaking but by rising from his bed four or five times in one night. When he was having his shoes or his clothes put on he used not only to admit his friends, but even if the Count of the Palace informed him of some law-suit which could not be settled without his order, he would direct the litigants to be at once introduced into his presence, and would hear the cause and pronounce sentence exactly as if he were sitting on the judgment seat. And not only so, but he would also at the same time tell each official or servant of the palace what duty he had to perform that day.”
“He was full even to overflowing in his eloquence, and could express all his ideas with very great clearness. And not being satisfied with his native language alone, he also gave much attention to the learning of foreign tongues, among which was Latin, which he learned so perfectly that he was accustomed to pray indifferently in that language or in his own. Greek, however, he learned to understand better than to pronounce. He was in truth so eloquent that he seemed like a professional rhetorician. In learning grammar he attended the lectures of Peter of Pisa, an old man and a deacon: in other studies he had for his teacher another deacon, Albinus, surnamed Alcuin, from Britain, a man of Saxon race and extremely learned in all subjects, with whom he gave a great deal of time and toil to the study of rhetoric and dialectic, and pre-eminently to that of 235 astronomy. He learned the art of computation, and with wise earnestness most carefully investigated the course of the stars. He tried also to write, and for this purpose used to carry about with him tablets and manuscripts [to copy] which were placed under the pillows of his bed in order that he might at odd times accustom his fingers to the shaping of the letters: but the attempt was made too late in life and was not successful.”
“He was a devout and zealous upholder of the Christian religion, with which he had been imbued from infancy. He regularly attended the church which he had built at Aquisgranum morning and evening, and also in the hours of the night and at the time of sacrifice, as far as his health permitted; and he took great pains that all the rites celebrated therein should be performed with the greatest decorum, constantly admonishing the ministers of the church that they should not allow anything dirty or unbecoming to be brought thither or to remain within it. He provided so large a supply of holy vessels of gold and silver and of priestly vestments, that in celebrating the sacrifices there was no necessity even for the doorkeepers, who were of the lowest grade of ecclesiastics, to minister in their private dress. He took great pains to reform the style of reading and singing, in both of which he was highly accomplished, though he did not himself read in public nor sing, save in a low voice and with the rest of the congregation.”
“He was very earnest in the maintenance of the poor and in almsgiving, so that not only in his own country and kingdom did he thus labour, but also beyond 236 sea. To Syria, to Egypt, to Africa, to Jerusalem, to Carthage, wherever he heard that there were Christians living in poverty, he was wont to send money as proof of his sympathy, and for this reason especially did he seek the friendship of transmarine kings, in order that some refreshment and relief might come to the Christians under their rule. But before all other sacred and venerable places he reverenced the church of St. Peter at Rome, and in its treasure chamber great store of wealth, in gold, silver, and precious stones was piled up by him. Many gifts, past counting, were sent by him to the popes, and through the whole of his reign no object was dearer to his heart than that the city of Rome by his care and toil should enjoy its old pre-eminence, and that the church of St. Peter should not only by his aid be safely guarded, but also by his resources should be adorned and enriched beyond all other churches. Yet though he esteemed that city so highly, in all the forty-seven years of his reign he went but four times thither to pay his vows and offer up his supplications.”
Amid such interests and such friendships the later years of Charles’s life glided away, comparatively little disturbed by the clash of arms, since his two elder sons Charles and Pippin, brave and capable men both of them, now relieved him of most of the drudgery of war. It is hinted that there was some occasions of variance between the two brothers, but it is not certain that Pippin the Hunchback is not the person here alluded to as at enmity with the younger Charles; and the difference, whatever it may have been, is said to have been removed by the mediation of St. Goar, whose cell on the banks of the Rhine was visited by the two princes.
227In 806, at the Villa Theodonis, Charles, in the presence of a great assembly of his nobles, made a formal division of his dominions between his three sons. Pippin was to have Italy, or as it was called, Langobardia, with Bavaria and Germany south of the Danube, also the subject realms of the Avars and southern Sclaves. Louis was to have Aquitaine, Provence, and the greater part of Burgundy. All the rest, that is Neustria, Austrasia, the remainder of Burgundy, and Germany north of the Danube was to go to Charles, who was probably to have some sort of pre-eminence over his brothers, though nothing was expressly said as to the imperial title. The division was so ordered that each brother had access to the dominions of the other two, and both Charles and Louis were earnestly enjoined to go to the help of Pippin — then apparently the most exposed to hostile attack — if he should require their help in Italy. Elaborate arrangements were also made as to the succession, in case of the death of any of the brothers.
Unhappily all these dispositions proved futile. The year 810, in which Godofrid of Denmark died, and also Haroun’s elephant Abu-l-Abbas, was in other ways a sore year for Charles. On 6th June his eldest daughter Hrotrud, once the affianced bride of the Eastern Cæsar, died, unmarried but leaving an illegitimate son, Louis, who afterwards became Abbot of St. Denis. Ere Charles had time to recover from this blow came the tidings that Pippin, the young king of Italy, had died on 8th July, possible (but this is only a conjecture) of some malady contracted during his campaign of many months among the lagunes of Venice.
228So, though Pippin left a son, the lad Bernhard, who, if things went well with him, might hope to inherit his father’s kingdom, already a breach was made in Charles’s arrangements for the succession to his dominions. But a yet heavier blow fell upon him next year (4th December 811), when his eldest son Charles, that one of all his children who most resembled him in aptitude for war and government, in strength of body and manly beauty, was torn from him by death. Now, of all his sons, there was only left that pathetically devout and incapable figure who is known to posterity as Louis the Pious or Louis the Debonnair, but whose piety and whose good nature were alike to prove disastrous when he should be called upon to guide with his nerveless hands the fiery steeds which had drawn his father’s car of empire.
However, there was no other heir available. In September 813 a generalis conventus was held at Aachen, at which, after taking the advice of his nobles, Charles placed the imperial crown on the head of Louis, and ordered him to be called Imperator and Augustus, thereby designating him as his successor, but not, as it should seem, admitting him to a present participation in his power. With that keen insight into character which Charles undoubtedly possessed, he must have perceived the weakness of his son’s disposition, and fears for the future of the empire which he had built up with so much toil and difficulty probably saddened his last days.
The great emperor had now entered in the eighth decade of his life. His health was apparently failing, and there were also signs and portents betokening the 229 approaching end, which, with proper regard to classical precedent, are duly recorded by Einhard. For the last three years of his life there was an unusually large number of eclipses of the sun and moon. A big spot on the sun was observed for seven days. The colonnade between the church and palace at Aachen, constructed with great labour, fell in sudden ruin on Ascension-day. The great bridge over the Rhine at Mainz, which had been ten years in building, and for which Einhard himself had acted as clerk of the works, was burnt to the water’s edge in three hours. Then, in his last expedition against Danish Godofrid (but that was as far back as 810), a fiery torch had been seen to fall from heaven, in a clear sky, on the sinister side, and Charles’s horse at the same moment falling heavily had thrown his master to the ground with such violence that the clasp of his cloak was broken, his sword-belt burst, and the spear which he held in his hand was hurled forwards twenty feet or more. Moreover there were crackings of the palace-ceilings; the golden apple which was on the roof of the church was struck by lightning and thrown on to the roof of the archbishop’s palace hard by. In the inscription which ran round the interior of the dome, and which contained the words KAROLVS PRINCEPS, the letters of the second word, only a few months before Charles’s death, faded and became invisible. All these signs convinced thoughtful persons that an old man of more than seventy, who had led a hard and strenuous life, and who was bowed by many recent sorrows, had not long to live.
In the year 811, the emperor, feeling that the end was not far off, had given elaborate orders as to the 230 disposal of his personal property, consisting of gold, silver, and precious stones. The details, though curious, need not be quoted here. It is sufficient to say that only one-twelfth of the whole was to be divided among his children and grand-children. About two-thirds were to be divided among the ecclesiastics of twenty-one chief cities in his dominions. The remainder was for his servants and the poor. It is interesting to observe that the division of the property was to be completed “after his death or voluntary renunciation of the things of this world.” There was therefore a possibility that the first Emperor Charles might have anticipated the fifth in retiring from a palace into a convent. Also we note with interest a square salver table containing a plan of the city of Constantinople, which was to be sent as a gift to St. Peter’s at Rome; a round one containing a similar plan of Rome, which was to be sent to the Archbishop of Ravenna; and a third, “far surpassing the others in weight of metal and beauty of workmanship, which consisted of three spheres linked together, and which embraced a plan of the whole world with delicate and minute delineation,” and which was to be sold for the benefit of the residuary legatees and the poor.
At last the time came for all these dispositions to take effect. After the great assembly in which the imperial diadem was placed on the head of Louis of Aquitaine (Sept. 813), Charles, though in feeble health, went on one of his usual hunting expeditions in the neighbourhood of Aachen. The autumn was thus passed, and at the beginning of November he returned to the palace to winter there. In January (814) he was attacked by a severe fever 231 and took to his bed. According to his usual custom he thought to subdue the fever by fasting, but pleurisy was added to the fever, and in his reduced state he had no power to grapple with the disease. After partaking of the Communion he departed this life at nine in the morning of the 28th of January 814. He was then in the seventy-second year of his age, and the forty-seventh of his reign. On the day of his death he was buried in his own church of St. Mary, amidst the lamentations of his people. On a gilded arch above his tomb was inscribed this epitaph. “Under this tomb-stone is laid the body of Charles, the great and orthodox Emperor, who gloriously enlarged the kingdom of the Franks and reigned prosperously for 47 years (sic). He died, a septuagenarian, in the year of our Lord 814, in the 7th Indiction on the 5th day before the Kalends of February.”
Before many years had passed, the adjective Magnus was universally affixed by popular usage to the name Carolus: and 351 years after his death he received the honour of canonisation from the Roman Church.