From Charles the Great, by Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897; pp. 125-140.
CHAPTER VII
Revolts and Conspiracies
In tracing the history of Charles’s long struggle with the Saxons we have come down to a very late point in the story of his reign. We must now retrace our steps and notice some of the more important events that happened during that struggle of thirty years. And first it will be well to deal with some of the unsuccessful attempts that were made in various parts of his dominions, other than Saxon-land, to throw off the yoke of this strong and masterful ruler.
Less then two years after the downfall of the Lombard monarchy, at the end of 775, when Charles was fully committed to his life-and-death contest with Saxon heathenism, he received tidings of an attempt on the part of at least one Lombard duchy to recover its independence. Before leaving Italy he had either appointed a Lombard noble named Hrodgaud, Duke of Friuli, or had confirmed him in the possession of that duchy. Forum Julii, which we now know by the name of Friuli, and whose chief city is now called Cividale, included the fertile lands north of the Venetian Gulf, and was of primary importance to the Frankish king as 126 it touched on the one side the provinces of Venetia and Istria (wavering at this time between allegiance to him and their old allegiance to Constantinople) and on the other side the lands of the Duke of Bavaria, who, as we shall soon see, was one of the most untrustworthy of subject princes.
Hrodgaud appears to have been engaged in some obscure negotiations with the Lombard dukes of Chiusi and Benevento for cutting short the new papal territories, perhaps also for bringing in the exiled son of Desiderius and raising once more the standard of Lombard independence. But the combination failed, owing perhaps in part to the death of the Emperor Constantine V., which happened in the autumn of 775. The young Lombard prince Adelchis failed to make his appearance in Italy; the Dukes of Chiusi and Benevento hung back from the dangerous enterprise and Hrodgaud of Friuli was left alone to meet the Frankish avenger. His courage did not fail; he seems to have proclaimed himself king, doubtless “King of the Lombards,” and persuaded many cities in northern Italy to join his standard. But Charles, warned of his revolt before the end of 775, crossed the Alps in the early months of 776. The passes cannot yet have been open, and it must have been with a small but select body of troops that he made his rapid descent upon Friuli. Hrodgaud seems to have fallen in battle. Cividale surrendered. Treviso, where Hrodgaud’s father-in-law, Stabilinus, sought to prolong the struggle, was also captured and was the scene of Charles’s Easter festivities. All the other cities were taken, and in June Charles recrossed the Alps to march swiftly northward to recapture 127 the oft-taken Eresburg, and to baptize some thousands of Saxons in the Lippe.
Considering the difficulties of locomotion at that time this short Italian campaign against Hrodgaud seems to have been one of the most rapid and brilliant of all the military operations of King Charles. The suppression of the revolt was followed, not indeed by bloodshed, but by severe confiscations of the property of the insurgents. We have a piteous account by the great Lombard historian, Paulus Diaconus, of the seven years’ captivity of his brother, who is generally believed to have been punished for his share in this insurrection. “My brother languishes a captive in your land, broken-hearted, in nakedness and want. His unhappy wife, with quivering lips, begs for bread from street to street. Four children must she support in this humiliating manner, whom she is scarce able to cover even with rags.”
The next threatening of internal disaffection came from a quarter in which the sky had long looked lowering. Tassilo III., Duke of Bavaria, was the most independent and high-spirited of all the subject nobles in the Frankish kingdom. Sprung from the old Agilolfing line, which for more than two centuries had ruled the Bavarian people, he had some pretensions to a descent from Merovingian royalty, and was the undoubted grandson of Charles Martel, and therefore first cousin of King Charles, with whom he was strictly contemporary, having been born in the year 742. The dependence of Bavaria upon the Frankish crown had always been of the slightest kind, consisting of little more than a verbal recognition of the supremacy of the Frankish king, and 128 the sending of a contingent to serve in the Frankish army, while, in all the details of ordinary administration, the will of the Agilolfing duke seems to have been practically supreme. Moreover, close ties of affinity and common interests had long united the ducal house of Bavaria and the regal house of Lombard Italy. Together they had resisted the incursions of their turbulent neighbours on the east, the Avars and the Sclaves; together they had sought, rather by diplomacy than by war, to keep at a distance from them the domineering Frank.
In the later years of Pippin, as has been already stated, this tendency of Bavaria to independence was openly displayed. It is true that in the year 757, when Pippin was holding his placitum at Compiègne, thither came the young Tassilo with the chiefs of his nation, and, “after the Frankish manner placing his hands in the hands of the king, commended himself unto him in vassalage, and promised fidelity both to King Pippin himself and to his sons Charles and Carloman by an oath on the body of St. Dionysius, and not only there, but also over the bodies of St. Martin and St. Germanus with a similar oath promised that he would keep faith towards his aforesaid lords all the days of his life. And similarly all the chiefs and seniors of the Bavarians who had come with him into the presence of the king promised at the said holy places that they would keep faith towards the king and his sons.” But the very insistence on this ceremony probably showed that the loyalty of the Bavarians was deemed precarious. It is certain that six years later (763), in the very crisis of the war with Aquitaine, “Tassilo, Duke of Bavaria, neglected his oaths 129 and all his promises, forgot all the benefits which he had received from his uncle, King Pippin, and, making a fraudulent excuse of sickness, withdrew himself from the campaign. Then, strengthening his resolution to revolt, he stoutly declared that he would come no more into the king’s presence.” This was nothing less than to commit the crime of harisliz (military desertion), which, according to Frankish law, was punishable by death. But as we saw, King Pippin wisely determined to fight with one enemy at a time, and devoted all his energies to the long war with Waifar of Aquitaine, a war which practically occupied him till the end of his days. Thus the harisliz of Tassilo III. went for the time unpunished.
Then came Charles’s accession to the throne, and his marriage with the daughter of Desiderius. By this marriage a tie of affinity was formed between the two cousins, — the lord and contumacious vassal — for Tassilo also about the same time married another daughter of Desiderius, named Liutberga. It seemed for a short time as if Frank, Bavarian, and Lombard might dwell together in amity; but only for a short time. Soon followed the repudiation of the Lombard princess, Pope Hadrian’s cry for help, the invasion of Italy, the fall of the Lombard kingdom. During all these stirring events Tassilo seems to have remained quiescent, yet assuredly then, if ever, would have been his chance to assert the independence after which he yearned.
So too during the rebellion of Hrodgaud of Friuli, when doubtless he might have intercepted Charles’s passage, and made the suppression of that rebellion a much more tedious affair than it actually was, Tassilo made no sign. He seems to have thought his sulky 130 attitude of isolation and de facto independence of his lord would maintain itself without any trouble on his part, but he was greatly mistaken. His Frankish over-lord was no roi fainéant to let his rights thus quietly glide into desuetude.
Charles tried first spiritual means, which were perhaps suggested by the fact of his finding himself in the presence of the pope. Towards the end of 780, in one of those short lulls in the storm which made him deem the work of the subjugation of the Saxons complete, Charles visited Italy, kept his Christmas in the old Lombard palace at Pavia, held a placitum at Mantua, and at Easter visited Rome. He was accompanied by his wife and his sons, Carloman and Louis, children of four and three years old. Carloman, who had not yet been baptized, was raised from the baptismal font by Pope Hadrian, who gave him the ancestral name of Pippin, and being anointed by the pope was declared by his father to be King of Italy. At the same time his yet more infantile brother, Louis, was anointed King of Aquitaine. Of course in both cases all kingly power remained in the hands of the great War-lord; but apparently the object of the ceremony was something like that which caused our Edward I. to name the baby Edward of Caernarvon, Prince of Wales. National pride was soothed, and national patriotism in some degree reassured, by the presence of a court and the assurance of a separate administration, even though the nominal head of the court was a little child in the nursery.
While Charles was at Rome there was converse between him and the pope concerning the Duke of Bavaria. Tassilo had been a liberal friend to the 131 Church, and had successfully prosecuted the enterprise of the conversion of the Sclaves on his eastern frontier. Hadrian well knew how strained were the relations between duke and king, and was, we may believe, sincerely anxious to reconcile Tassilo to his mighty cousin. A joint embassy was despatched to the Bavarian court: the pope being represented by the bishops, Damasus and Formosus, the king by the deacon Richulf and Eberhard, the arch-cupbearer. “And when,” says the chronicler, “these emissaries, obedient to their instruction, had conversed with the aforesaid duke, and reminded him of his old oaths to King Pippin, King Charles and the Franks, his heart was so much softened that he declared his willingness to hasten at once to the king’s presence, if such hostages were given him as to remove all doubt of his personal safety. These having been given, he came without delay to the king at Worms, swore the oath which was dictated to him and gave twelve chosen hostages for the fulfilment of his promise that he would keep as towards King Charles and his loyal subjects all the oaths which he had sworn aforetime to King Pippin. These hostages were promptly brought to the king in his villa of Quierzy by Sindbert, Bishop of Ratisbon. But the said duke returning home did not long remain in the faith which he had promised.”
Notwithstanding the ominous words with which the chronicler concludes, a great moral victory had certainly been gained by Charles, and the attitude of sullen semi-independence which Tassilo had maintained for nearly twenty years was now abandoned.
For six years (781-787) the name of Tassilo disappears 132 from the chronicles, and we may conclude that he was for so long a fairly loyal subject of the Frankish kingdom, or rather perhaps that he committed no such open act of rebellion as to compel Charles, engrossed as he was during these years by the war with Widukind, to send any of his sorely needed Frankish warriors for the chastisement of his Bavarian vassal.
Moreover, the open enmity of the Saxons was not the only danger that at this time menaced the security of the Frankish throne. In the year 785, immediately after the baptism of Widukind, we have the following mysterious entry in the chronicles: “There was made in that same year on the other side of the Rhine a vast conspiracy of the eastern Franks against the king, of which it was proved that Count Hardrad was the author. But information thereof was speedily brought to the king, and by his shrewdness so mighty a conspiracy shortly collapsed without any great danger, the authors thereof being condemned, some to death, some to privation of sight, and some to deportation and exile.” Even the king’s life was aimed at by the conspirators, yet Einhard assures us that none of the conspirators were actually killed save three who drew their swords upon the officers who were sent to arrest them. The cause of this sudden outbreak of Austrasian jealousy and rage against the great Austrasian hero must remain a mystery. Some of the authorities seem to speak of it as a specially Thuringian conspiracy, and one attributes it to the refusal of a Thuringian chief to hand over his daughter to a Frankish suitor to whom she was betrothed. An attempt has been made to account for it as the last struggle of Thuringian independence, dismayed at seeing the Saxons 133 on the north and the Bavarians on the south subjected to the all-mastering Frankish king. It seems, however, more probable that it was a personal, palace conspiracy. Possibly Einhard gives us the requisite clue when he attributes both this and a subsequent conspiracy to the cruelty of Charles’s queen Fastrada who “diverted her husband from the kindness and accustomed gentleness of his nature.”
Towards the end of 786 Charles again marched to Italy, where the not only independent but even hostile attitude of Arichis, Prince of Benevento, called for his attention. Having spent his Christmas at Florence, and paid his devotions at the tombs of the Apostles in Rome, he proceeded southward (787), and on the confines of the Beneventan territory was met by Romwald, son of Arichis, with gifts and promises and entreaties that he would not enter his father’s territory. But Charles, says the chronicler, “thinking that he must deal very differently with an enterprise once begun, kept Romwald with him and marched with all his army to Capua, where he pitched his camp, and would have carried on the war from thence, unless the aforesaid duke had anticipated his intention by wholesome counsel. For leaving his capital, Benevento, he betook himself with all his followers to the seaport of Salerno, as being a more fortified city, and, sending an embassy, he offered both his sons to the king, promising that he would willingly obey all his commands. Listening to these prayers, and moved also by the fear of God, the king abstained from war; and keeping the younger son Grimwald as a hostage, sent the elder son back to his father. He, moreover, received eleven hostages from the rest of the 134 nation, and sent ambassadors to strengthen the covenant of the prince and all the people of Benevento by oaths.” Thus had the Frankish king, without striking a blow, extended his dominion to the southernmost corner of Italy. It was, however, a precarious conquest; and the princes of Benevento were almost to the end of Charles’s reign either doubtful vassals or open enemies of the Frankish ruler.
Easter of 787 was spent by King Charles in Rome, and this visit, like that of five years before, was followed by a further development of the contest between him and Duke Tassilo. Doubtless the hollow reconciliation of 782 had been followed by mutual suspicion and estrangement; and the Bavarian duke must have felt that, with the Saxon rebellion now apparently quelled, his turn for subjugation would come next. While the king was still in Rome, there appeared in that city two Bavarian envoys, Arno Bishop of Salzburg, and Huneric Abbot of Mond See, who besought the pope to mediate between Charles and their master. The pope, as before, expressed his hearty goodwill towards Tassilo, and an interview between king and envoys followed in his presence. But when Charles called upon the bishop and the abbot to state what guarantee their master had empowered them to give for the fulfilment, this time, of his often violated promises, they could only answer that they had no instructions on this head, being not plenipotentiaries on Tassilo’s behalf, only messengers whose duty it was to carry back to their master the propositions of the king and pontiff. Apparently, then, the duke had reverted to the old position of all but equality with the Frankish king which he took up twenty-four years 135 before at the time of the great harisliz, and the solemnly plighted oaths sworn at Worms were to go for nothing. Hadrian was not less indignant than Charles at this exhibition of fickleness and bad faith, and appears to have visited his displeasure on the two churchmen-ambassadors themselves, telling them that they and their master were all liars together, and that they should all be visited by the papal anathema unless Tassilo kept the oaths which he had sworn to Charles and to Pippin. We have here one of the earliest instances of that use of ecclesiastical censures to enforce political claims which was so characteristic a feature of the Middle Ages.
The ambassadors returned to Bavaria empty-handed: and the king, recrossing the Alps, went to rejoin his wife, the hard and haughty Fastrada, at Worms. Probably her influence was not used to soften his temper towards the rebellious duke. A general assembly was called, to which the king rehearsed all the events of his Italian journey, concluding with the story of the abortive negotiations with Tassilo. By the advice probably of his nobles, one more embassy was sent to claim from the Bavarian the fulfilment of his promises and to summon him to the royal presence. On his refusal, Frankish invaders from three different points entered the devoted duchy. Italian Pippin from the South marched from Trient up the valley of the Adige and over the watershed of the Inn; Charles himself crossed the Lech and entered Bavaria from the west by way of Augsburg. A little further to the north, near Ingoldstadt, came an army of Austrasian Franks, including not only Thuringians but even Saxons, so great was Charles’s confidence in that pacification of the country which, as after events 136 showed, was then but half completed. Seeing himself thus surrounded, and also knowing that many of his own subjects would side with the invaders — for apparently to the ordinary Bavarian landowner the prospect of a distant lord paramount at Aachen or Quierzy was more acceptable than the reality of a present and stringent master on the banks of the Danube — Tassilo gave up the game, presented himself at Charles’s headquarters, handed over to him a stick, carved into some resemblance of a man, as a symbol of the land for which he did homage, and gave as a hostage his son Theodo, who for the last ten years had been associated with him as ruler of the duchy. Hostages, as usual, twelve in number, were given for Tassilo’s adherence to his freshly made promises, and at the same time the people of the land were in some way, the details of which are not disclosed, made parties to his oath of fidelity to Charles.
It is not easy to account for the harsh proceedings of the next year (788) after this apparent reconciliation of the vassal to his lord. Possibly something had come to light which justified Charles in the belief that Tassilo would never honestly accept the position of vassal for which he had so often endeavoured to escape. An assembly was convened at Ingelheim, probably in the month of June. Tassilo, now helpless and unarmed, was summoned to appear before it, and was there accused, on the evidence of some of his own subjects who were loyal to Charles, of having opened negotiations with the barbarous Avars on the east after his last submission to the Frankish king. Liutberga, his Lombard queen mindful of the old feud of her father’s wrongs, was said to have been the ceaseless 137 preacher of revenge. Even against the life of Charles, Tassilo was accused of having conspired, and when men spoke to him of the danger in which he thus placed his hostage-son, he is said to have answered: “Had I ten sons I would lose them all in this cause, since it were better for me to die than to live a vassal on such ignominious terms as I have sworn to.” Then the old accusation of the harisliz of 763 was brought up against him, and on this and other charges he was found guilty by the assembled nobles, Franks, and Bavarians, Lombards and Saxons, assembled from all parts of Charles’s realm, and by their united voice was adjudged worthy of death. This sentence, however, was commuted by “the most pious Charles, moved by compassion and the love of God and because he was his kinsman: and he obtained from his own servants and the servants of God [the nobles secular and religious] this favour, that he should not die. Then Tassilo, being asked by the most clement king what he wished, begged that he might have leave to assume the tonsure and enter a monastery, there to do penance for so many sins, that he might save his soul. Similarly his son Theodo was sentenced, tonsured, and sent into a monastery, and the few Bavarians who chose to remain in opposition to King Charles were banished.”
According to one authority, Tassilo, while accepting tranquilly the decree which consigned him for the rest of his days to the monotonous seclusion of a convent, begged that his long hair, the symbol of his Frankish or even Merovingian descent, might not be shorn off in public, in the sight of his Frankish compeers, his Bavarian followers and companions in arms, and this 138 favour was granted him by the clemency of the king. He was sent at once to the monastery of St. Goar on the Rhine, and afterwards to the safer seclusion of Jumièges in Normandy. His sons and his daughters were also persuaded or compelled to enter various convents: his wife, scion of that unhappy race which seemed doomed to disaster in all its members, was either banished or like the rest of her family accepted the sentence of seclusion in the cloister. Once more does Tassilo appear upon the stage of history, when in the year 794 he was brought to the assembly at Frankfort (an assembly convened ostensibly for a purely theological purpose) and there “made his peace with the lord the king, renouncing all the power which he had once held in Bavaria and handing it over to the king.” It is suggested that the law had been somewhat strained by Tassilo’s condemnation in the assembly at Ingelheim and that this formal and professedly voluntary surrender of his rights was deemed necessary to perfect Charles’s title as ruler of Bavaria. After this event Tassilo vanishes from the scene, the year and place of his death being alike unrecorded by authentic history.
For the later history of Europe and especially of Germany, the deposition of Tassilo and the vindication of the imperilled Frankish supremacy over Bavaria were perhaps even more important than the perpetually recurring Saxon campaigns which fill so large a space in Charles’s annals. Sooner or later Saxon-land was almost certain to become Christian and civilised, and so to enter the Frankish orbit: but at Charles’s accession there seemed to be a great probability that Bavaria would turn her de facto independence into 189 separation de jure from the Frankish realm. This would have caused a separation of the Germany of the future into two independent states, a kingdom of the North and a kingdom of the South, which, as we know, never actually took place in the Middle Ages.
With one more conspiracy, this time of a domestic character, the tale of treasons is ended. In the year 792 (the year in which Charles had an Avar war and a Saxon rebellion on his hands at once, and made his abortive attempt to join the Danube and the Rhine by a canal), there was added to all his other cares a rebellion headed by one of his own flesh and blood. His eldest son Pippin was apparently not born in wedlock, though his mother Himiltrud, after her son’s birth, probably became Charles’s lawfully wedded wife. This defect of legitimacy would not have been an unsuperable bar to succession in a house which derived its chief glories from the illegitimate Charles Martel; but there was another and more fatal circumstance in the case of Charles’s firstborn. Though beautiful in face he was deformed, probably dwarfish in figure, an unsuitable person therefore to be presented to the assembled Frankish warriors as heir to his father’s kingdom. Thus Pippin, though to a certain extent maintaining his princely rank, and named next to his father in the litanies of the Church, seems to have been silently edged out from all hope of succeeding to any portion of that father’s power. Charles, the eldest son of Hildegard, was apparently recognised as principal heir. Carloman and Louis were taken to Rome in their infancy and anointed Kings of Italy and Aquitaine, while Pippin was left unnoticed. Perhaps even the imposition of the ancestral name of 140 Pippin on the child Carloman was meant as a hint to his elder namesake that he would never be saluted as Pippin, King of the Franks.
This exclusion doubtless galled the firstborn; and to these wrongs of his, real or imaginary, appear to have been added some inflicted on him and on his friends and followers by the unloved Fastrada. Thus, while most of the other chroniclers can see in the conspiracy of Pippin only the unholy attempt of a bastard, like another Abimelech, to seize the royal power at the cost of the lives of all his legitimate brethren, the honest Einhard in the following passage of his annals puts a different colour on the enterprise.
“When the king was spending his summer at Ratisbon, a conspiracy was made against him by his eldest son, named Pippin, and certain Franks who declared that they could not bear the cruelty of the queen Fastrada, and therefore conspired for the death of the king. And when this was detected by means of Fardulf the Lombard, he, to reward him for his loyalty, was presented with the monastery of St. Dionysius [St. Denis], but the authors of the conspiracy, as being guilty of treason, were partly slain by the sword and partly hung from gallows, and so with their lives paid forfeit for the meditation of such a crime.”
Pippin’s own life was spared, but his head was shorn, and he was sent “to serve God in a monastery.” The place of his confinement was Prum in the Moselle country, and there apparently he remained till his death, which happened in 811. So ended the last and probably the most dangerous of the conspiracies against King Charles’s life and government.