CHA P. Overspread the modern dominions of Prussia, PoXLIX. land, and Bohemia, and some transient marks of obedience have tempted the French historian to extend the empire to the Baltic and the Vistula. The conquest or conversion of those countries is of a more recent age; but the first union of Bohemia with the Germanic body may be justly ascribed Hungary. to the arms of Charlemagne. V. He retaliated on the Avars, or Huns of Pannonia, the same calamities which they had inflicted on the nations. Their rings, the wooden fortifications which encircled their districts and villages, were broken down by the triple effort of a French army, that was poured into their country by land and water, through the Carpathian mountains, and along the plain of the Danube. After a bloody conflict of eight years, the loss of some French generals was avenged by the slaughter of the most noble Huns: The relics of the nation submitted; the royal residence of the chagan was left desolate and unknown; and the treasures, the rapine of two hundred and fifty years, enriched the victorious troops, or decorated the churches of Italy and Gaul*. After the reduction of Pannonia, the empire of Charlemagne was bounded only by the conflux of the Danube with the Teyss and the Save: The provinces of Istria, Liburnia, and Dal matia, * Quot prælia in eo gesta! quantum sanguinis effusum sit! Testatur vacua omni habitatione Pannonia, et locus in quo regia Cagani fuit ita desertus, ut ne vestigium quidem humanæ habitationis appareat. Tota in hoc bello Hunnorum nobilitas periit, tota gloria decidit, omnis pecunia et congesti ex longo tempore thesauri direpti sunt. matia, were an easy, though unprofitable, acces- c H A P. sion; and it was an effect of his moderation, that XLIX. he left the maritime cities under the real or nominal sovereignty of the Greeks. But these distant possessions added more to the reputation than to the power of the Latin emperor; nor did he risk any ecclesiastical foundations to reclaim the Barbarians from their vagrant life and idolatrous worship. Some canals of communication between the rivers, the Saône and the Meuse, the Rhine and the Danube, were faintly attempted *. Their execution would have vivified the empire; and more cost and labour were often wasted in the structure of a cathedral. bours and If we retrace the outlines of this geographical His neighpicture, it will be seen, that the empire of the enemies. Franks extended, between east and west, from the Ebro to the Elbe or Vistula; between the north and south, from the duchy of Beneventum to the river Eyder, the perpetual boundary of Germany and Denmark. The personal and political importance of Charlemagne was magnified by the distress and division of the rest of Europe. The islands of Great Britain and Ireland were disputed by a crowd of princes of Saxon or Scottish origin; and, after the loss of Spain, the Christian and Go thic *The junction of the Rhine and Danube was undertaken only for the service of the Pannonian war, (Gaillard, Vie de Charlemagne, tom. ii. p. 312-315.) The canal, which would have been only two leagues in length, and of which some traces are still extant in Swabia, was interrupted by excessive rains, military avocations, and superstitious fears, (Schæpflin, Hist. de l'Academie des Inscriptions, tom. xviii. p. 256. Moimina fluviorum, &c. jungendorum, p. 59–62.) XLIX. CHA P. thic kingdom of Alphonso the Chaste, was confined to the narrow range of the Asturian mountains. These petty sovereigns revered the power or virtue of the Carlovingian monarch, implored the honour and support of his alliance, and stiled him their common parent, the sole and supreme emperor of the West *. He maintained a more equal intercourse with the caliph Harun al Rashid †, whose dominion stretched from Africa to India, and accepted from his ambassadors a tent, a water-clock, an elephant, and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. It is not easy to conceive the private friendship of a Frank and an Arab, who were strangers to each other's person, and language, and religion; but their public correspondence was founded on vanity, and their remote situation left no room for a competition of interest. Two-thirds of the Western empire of Rome were subject to Charlemagne, and the deficiency was amply supplied by his command of the inaccessible or invincible nations of Germany. But in the choice of his enemies, we may be reasonably surprised that he so often preferred the poverty of the north to the riches of the south. The thirty-three campaigns laboriously consumed in the woods and morasses of Germany, would have sufficed to assert the *See Eginhard, c. 16. and Gaillard, tom. ii. p. 361-385. who mentions, with a loose reference, the intercourse of Charlemagne and Egbert, the emperor's gift of his own sword, and the modest answer of his Saxon disciple. The anecdote, if genuine, would have adorned our English histories. The correspondence is mentioned only in the French annals, and the Orientals are ignorant of the caliph's friendship for the Christian dog-a polite appellation, which Harun bestows on the emperor of the Greeks. the amplitude of his title by the expulsion of the CHA P. Greeks from Italy and the Saracens from Spain. XLIX. The weakness of the Greeks would have ensured an easy victory: And the holy crusade against the Saracens would have been prompted by glory and revenge, and loudly justified by religion and policy. Perhaps, in his expeditions beyond the Rhine and the Elbe, he aspired to save his monarchy from the fate of the Roman empire, to disarm the enemies of civilized society, and to eradicate the seed of future emigrations. But it has been wisely observed, that in a light of precaution, all conquest must be ineffectual, unless it could be universal; since the increasing circle must be involved in a larger sphere of hostility *. The subjugation of Germany withdrew the veil which had so long concealed the continent or islands of Scandinavia from the knowledge of Europe, and awakened the torpid courage of their barbarous natives. The fiercest of the Saxon idolaters escaped from the Christian tyrant to their brethren of the north; the Ocean and Mediterranean were covered with their piratical fleets; and Charlemagne beheld with a sigh the destructive progress of the Normans, who, in less than seventy years, precipitated the fall of his race and monarchy. Had the pope and the Romans revived the His sucprimitive constitution, the titles of emperor and cessors, Augustus were conferred on Charlemagne for the 814-887, in Italy; term *Gaillard, tom. ii. p. 361-365. 471-176. 492. I have borrowed his judicious remarks on Charlemagne's plan of conquest, and the judicious distinction of his enemies of the first and the second enceinte, (tom. ii. p. 184. 509, &c.) A. D. 911 in Germany; 987 in France. CHA P. term of his life; and his successors, on each vaXLIX. cancy, must have ascended the throne by a formal or tacit election. But the association of his son Lewis the Pious asserts the independent right of monarchy and conquest, and the emperor seems on this occasion to have foreseen and prevented the A. D. 813. latent claims of the clergy. The royal youth was commanded to take the crown from the altar, and with his own hands to place it on his head, as a gift which he held from God, his father, and the nation *. The same ceremony was repeated, though with less energy, in the subsequent associations of Lothaire and Lewis the second; the Carlovingian sceptre was transmitted from father to son in a lineal descent of four generations; and the ambition of the popes was reduced to the empty honour of crowning and anointing these hereditary princes who were already invested with their powLewis the er and dominion. The pious Lewis survived his Pious, brothers, and embraced the whole empire of Char814-840. lemagne; but the nations and the nobles, his bishops and his children, quickly discerned that this mighty mass was no longer inspired by the same soul; and the foundations were undermined to the centre, while the external surface was yet fair and entire. After a war, or battle, which consumed one hundred thousand Franks, the empire A. D. was * Thegan, the biographer of Lewis, relates this coronation; and Baronius has honestly transcribed it, (A. D. 813, No. 13, &c. See Gaillard, tom. ii. p. 506, 507, 508.) howsoever adverse to the claims of the popes. For the series of the Carlovingians, see the historians of France, Italy, and Germany; Pfeffel, Schmidt, Velly, Muratori, and even Voltaire, whose pictures are sometimes just and always pleasing. |