Saxons into Germany and France, and divided the confiscated lands among great feudatory vassals. These deportations were thrice repeated in 796, in 798, and in 804; but this terrible combination of Eastern and Western, Assyrian and feudal methods of empire, extinguished even Saxon resistance, and created a civilized nation, which, in the next century, gave emperors to Germany, and kings to France. Everywhere the barbarian world gave signs of exhaustion; the creation in 798 of the "march of Spain," advanced the Frankish frontier to the Ebro. Herrick, the duke of Friuli, penetrated the nine circles of the ring, and Pepin, king of Italy, rased it the year after. The gold of the Avars brightened the two capitals of the West; but its late owners, deprived of their palladium, the ring, petitioned to be allowed to settle west of the Danube, and the Bohemians succeeding to their plains and marshes, were reduced in one campaign by the eldest son of Charlemagne.
In the midst of these triumphs the state of Rome caused anxiety. Leo III., the successor of Adrian, was surrounded by enemies. The nephews of the late pope attacked him on his way to the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, and attempted to deprive him by mutilation of speech and sight. Leo fled to Charlemagne at Paderborn, who restored him to the papal throne, and followed him to Rome. On the 24th of November, 800, Charlemagne was received on the steps of St. Peter's by the pope, the bishops, and the clergy. An inquiry, held a few days after, into certain charges preferred against the pope by the two nephews, resulted in the acquittal of the pope and the exile of his accusers. Leo, in the pulpit of St. Peter's, with the holy gospels in his hand, made a solemn affirmation of his innocence. But the great event was reserved for Christmas day. The Frankish and the papal courts met for high mass in the great Basilica. The pope in person chanted the service; Charlemagne knelt in devotion. A crown was placed upon his bent head by Leo, and the Romans thrice shouted—"To the most pious Charles, Augustus, crowned of God, mighty and pacific emperor, life and victory!" The pope completed the ceremony by adoring the new emperor in the manner prescribed by ancient imperial custom.
The Roman empire was restored. Again came the age of those mighty imperial artificers, under whose hands the map of civilized Europe had grown—pushing with the earlier Cæsars to the banks of the Rhine, or spreading with Trajan to the foot of the Carpathians. Again the landmarks of civilization were plucked up, and the tide of barbarism flung backwards ten degrees; but though the work was the old work, the spirit was new. In the "Holy Roman Empire" of the ninth century appears a new figure; this counted two leaders—a spiritual and a temporal—the emperor and the pope. "Duo soli," says Dante—
" Che l'una e l'altra strada,
Facèn vedere, e del mondo, e di Dio."—Purg. Cant. XVI.
The polytheism of ancient Rome had suited well with conquest, but more by its tolerance after victory than by any eagerness it inspired for war. The christianity of the Frankish period was warlike and propagandist throughout. "Alas," said Charlemagne, when disappointed by the retreat of a band of Norman brigands, "why have I not deserved to see how this christian arm of mine would have played about those apes!" This spirit of conquest—half theological, half military—is the distinctive characteristic of the reign of Charlemagne. Nor were these the only respects in which the empire was changed. Its silent and flexible mechanism was replaced by a noisy publicity, necessary in so Homeric an age. The terrible tongue of Charlemagne was everywhere—applauding, sneering, scolding. Two assemblies in spring and autumn gathered the important men of the empire together, and interested them in its welfare and progress. The emperor was among them, his shrill voice audible as he greeted his great nobles, chatted with rare visitors, comforted the old, joked with the young, and had a word for everybody. They gathered in the palace court, the stout Teutonic figures, who sustained the western world upon their lances—marquises and margraves from the march of Spain; the few dukes whom the jealous Charlemagne still suffered to exist; Herrik of Friuli, glittering with the spoils of the Avar Ring, with the warriors round him who had carried each of them nine wends together transfixed upon their spear-points; here and there one of the strange Carlovingian bishops, so open to temptation, so inconsolable in their remorse, so naïvely ignorant of this world, and so intimate with the evil spirits of the other; or an old noble from the sequestered valleys of Austrasia, who scorned with Charlemagne the short, many-coloured mantle of the Gauls, and stood there in his long blue tunic, with a knotted applestock in his right hand, a living relic of the past. Whatever their office or their origin, there were few to whom the gigantic presence of the emperor was not familiar; the round head, white and war-worn, the full bright eyes, the big nose, the great cheerful face and sturdy figure, were known in every county of the empire. They had seen him hunting on the Tyrolese Alps in his suit of sheepskin, bathing with a hundred paladins in the warm springs of Aix-la-Chapelle, or mounted on his war-horse, his daughters cavalcading behind him; "a man of iron, an iron helmet on his head, and gauntlets of iron on his hands, his iron chest and shoulders shielded by an iron cuirass, in his left hand a lance of iron lifted in the air, and grasping with the right hand his invincible 'Joyeuse.'" Or, perhaps, they had watched him at matins in his lighted chapel; his long white mantle reaching to his feet, following in an undertone the chanting of his unequalled choir, or uplifting that terrible high voice to rebuke a failure in the service. Such failures seldom occurred. A military precision reigned in the chapel of Charlemagne. No mark was needed or allowed to identify the lesson for the day. A movement of the imperial hand started the reader, and an inarticulate guttural ejaculation brought him to a close, frequently (sic visum superis) in the middle of a sentence. The liturgy used was that of Rome—the Gregorian chant had supplanted the Ambrosian. A story was told about the organ. Late one evening as he sat in his palace, Charlemagne heard melodious sounds of devotion from an adjacent chamber, where some Greek envoys were celebrating vespers with an organ. The emperor listened in rapture, and the imperial carpenters starved and thirsted until they produced an imitation. His grief could be as intense as his pleasure. He mourned for his friend. Pope Adrian, with passionate fits of weeping. The same intensity showed itself in his pursuit of knowledge. "Alcuin," says the biographer of Charlemagne, "appeased a little his thirst for learning, but could not satisfy it." When urged to punish Paulus Diaconus the historian, for conspiring to murder him, he replied—"How can I cut off one who writes so elegantly?" He spoke Latin, and understood Greek. But religious writings, especially those of St. Augustine, were his favourite study. "I would rather," he said to Archbishop Riculf, an obstinate admirer of Virgil, "I would rather possess the spirit of the four evangelists than that of all the twelve books of the Eneid." Alcuin was his master in grammar. He laboured long and successfully at rhetoric, logic, and astronomy; but the art of writing presented difficulties which he never fully overcame. Under the pillows of his camp-bed tablets and copyslips were always hidden, and the great emperor might be seen, in the intervals of his triumphs, humbly schooling his warworn fingers in the formation of the letters of the alphabet.
But his own studies were the least part of his services to knowledge. Around him were the foremost scholars of the age, gathered from all countries—Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon, Paul the Lombard deacon, the Goth Theodulf, the Scot Clement, the Tuscan Peter of Pisa; and the schools which produced later the great names of Anselm and Abelard were framed on the model of the palace school at Aix-la-Chapelle—the creation of Alcuin, who may take place, as the reviver of letters, with Boniface, the reformer of christianity, and Charlemagne, the restorer of the empire.
If we turn to the internal organization of the imperial government, we shall find ample reason why Charlemagne should seek to rest upon religion and education the vast system which, in reality, his indomitable resolution alone kept in play. His instruments of government were the legacy of ignorant and anarchical times. His counts and margraves were identical with those of Clovis, hardy Teutons, incapable as ever of comprehending office distinct from property, but checked by the institution of "missi dominici," imperial inspectors of administration, and by the precaution, which Charlemagne always observed, of never placing more than one county in the same hands. The slow paralysis of feudalism had long been stiffening the action of the empire. One hundred years before, the great mayor of the Neustrian palace, Ebroin, had torn in pieces with his own hands, the decree that bound him to select the counts from the counties they were to govern; but Charlemagne seems seldom to have been able to appoint his counts from the palace. The old judicial institutions of the Franks were giving way; the rakim-
