By THOMAS HODGKIN, D.C.L. WITH NOTES By HENRY KETCHAM A. L. BURT COMPANY, ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK Copyright, 1902, By E. A. BRAINERD....

In attempting to compress the history of the great Emperor Charles within the narrow limits of the present volume, I have undertaken a difficult task, and I trust that my fellow-historians will consider, not how much has been omitted, but how much, or rather how little, it was possible to insert. It may be thought that I might have gained space by proceeding at once to the beginning of Charles’s own reign instead of devoting more than eighty pages to his predecessors, but this did not seem to me

In the gradual transformation of the old world of classical antiquity into the world with which the statesmen of to-day must deal, no man played a greater part than Charles the Great, 1 King of the Franks and Emperor of Rome. The sharp lines of demarcation which we often draw between period and period, and which are useful as helps to memory, have not for the most part had any real existence in history, for in the world of men, as in the development of the material universe, it is true that unif

The historical student who visits in thought the nursery of modern European states—the period from 500 to 800 of the Christian era—finds with amused surprise how many of the features familiar to him in their weather-beaten old age he can trace in the faces of those baby kingdoms. Gothic Spain, with its manifold councils, its ecclesiastical intolerance, and its bitter persecutions of the Jews, is the anticipation of the Spain of the Ferdinands and the Philips. Italy, cleft in sunder by the patrim

Thus at last was supreme power in the Frankish kingdom concentrated in the hands of that family of statesmen who were to hold it for two centuries. I have been somewhat minute in tracing the history of the Neustrian Mayoralty, but in the Austrasian kingdom it seems to have been rather as great nobles than as Mayors of the Palace that the Arnulfings rose to eminence. When Pippin won the battle of Testri he had no Austrasian king in whose name he could fight, and he seems to have been known simply

The unity of the Frankish State, so dearly purchased by the heroic labors of Charles Martel, was as usual placed in jeopardy by the dying ruler’s arrangements for the succession to that which was now openly spoken of as his “principatus.” He left two sons, Carloman and Pippin, by his first wife Hrotrudis, and one, Grifo, by a Bavarian princess named Swanahild, whom he had married after an invasion of her country, and whose sister was the wife of the Lombard king Liutprand. This was the manner in

The situation of affairs after the death of Pippin seems at first sight almost the exact counterpart of that which existed at the death of Charles Martel. We have again two brothers ruling, one of them a Carloman, and the Frankish dominions are divided between them. There are however some important differences. In the first place the two young princes are now not mere majores domus but acknowledged kings. Moreover, the division of the Frankish territories between the brothers proceeds on a diffe

The year 772, which opened upon a reunited Frankish kingdom (Carloman having died at the close of the year preceding), and which was a blank as far as Frankish operations in Italy were concerned, was memorable as witnessing the beginning of that long struggle with Saxon independence and Saxon heathenism which was to occupy thirty-two central years in the life of Charles the Great. Whether he entered upon this struggle with a light heart it is impossible for us to say. Many a time he thought it w

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 than two years after the downfal

Though the greater part of his life was passed in war, and though he was undoubtedly a man of great personal courage, Charlemagne cannot be considered a great military commander. We have the testimony of Einhard that in the whole long Saxon war he himself was personally engaged in only two pitched battles, and most of his campaigns seem to have consisted rather of military promenades, against brave but ill-armed foes, than of hard-fought battles in which the genius and courage of the king at a c

It is a remarkable ethnological fact, and one for which there does not seem any obvious explanation, that, almost ever since the great barbarian migrations of the fourth century, the country between the Danube and the Carpathian mountains has been occupied by a people belonging to that which, for want of a better word, we call the Turanian stock; and yet that this Turanian deposit should not have been one and the same throughout, but was the result of three distinct migrations. In the fourth cen

Now that we are approaching the most important event in the life of Charlemagne, his assumption of the imperial title, it will be necessary to glance at his relations with the line of sovereigns who alone up to the year 800 wore the title of Emperor, the Cæsars of Constantinople. It will be hardly needful here to repeat the warning given by many recent historians against considering the State which was governed from Constantinople, between 476 and 800, as anything else than the Roman empire. As

The events described at the end of the last chapter happened in August 797. In the autumn of the following year, when Charles was resting at Aachen from the fatigues of a Saxon campaign on the banks of the Elbe, there appeared before him two Byzantine ambassadors, Michael, aforetime Patrician of Phrygia, and Theophilus, a priest of Blachernæ, who, on behalf of the Empress Irene, sought for and obtained the restoration of friendly relations between the empire and the kingdom. The covenant of peac

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

No ruler for many centuries so powerfully impressed the imagination of western Europe as the first Frankish Emperor of Rome. The vast cycle of romantic epic poetry which gathered round the name of Charlemagne, the stories of his wars with the Infidels, his expeditions to Constantinople and Jerusalem, his Twelve Peers of France, the friendship of Roland and Oliver and the treachery of Ganelon—all this is of matchless interest in the history of the development of mediæval literature, but of course

Note. --Many of the above dates are conjectural....

1  In the headings of this book, the form of the name Charlemagne is used throughout, in preference to the English form Charles the Great , or Charles I. (which suggests Charles Stuart), or the Latin form Carolus Magnus , or the grotesque combination of the Teutonic Karl with the Latin Magnus . The editor does not overlook the difficulties of the case. The word Charlemagne is conceded to be misleading because of its French form. It is natural to infer that the man so named was peculiarly connect