and their missionary and reorganizing labours necessarily worked some diffusion of Latinity.
The Frankish secular power which had supported Boniface, advanced to violent action when Charlemagne's sword bloodily constrained the Saxons to accept his rule and Christianity, the two inseverable objects which he tirelessly pursued. Nor could this ruler stay his mighty hand from the government of the Church within his realm. With his power to appoint bishops, he might, if he chose, control its councils. But apparently he chose to rule the Church directly; and his, and his predecessors' and successors' Capitularies (rather than Conciliar decrees) contain the chief ecclesiastical legislation for the Frankish realm.
In its temporalities and secular action the Church was the greatest and richest of all subjects; it possessed the rights of lay vassals and was affected with like duties.[1] But in ritual, doctrine, language and affiliation, the Frankish Church made part of the Roman Catholic Church. It used the Roman liturgy and the Latin tongue. The ordering of the clergy was Roman, and the regulation of the monasteries was Romanized by the adoption of the Benedictine regula. Within the Church Rome had triumphed. Prelates were vassals of the king who had now become Emperor; and the great corporate Church was subject to him. Nevertheless, this great corporate institution was Roman rather than Gallic or Frankish or German. It was Teuton only in those elements which represented ecclesiastical abuses, for example, the remaining irregularities of various kinds, the lay and martial habits of prelates, and even their appointment by the monarch. These were the elements which the Church in its logical Roman evolution was to eliminate. Charlemagne himself, as well as his lesser successors, strove just as zealously to bring the people into obedience to the Church as into obedience to the lay rulers. While the Carolingian rule was
- ↑ For example, immunity (from governmental taxation and visitation) might attach to the lands of bishops and abbots, as it might to the lands of a lay potentate. On the other hand, the lands of bishops and abbots owed the Government such temporal aid in war and peace as would have attached to them in the hands of laymen. Such dignitaries had high secular rank. The king did not interfere with the appointment and control of the lower clergy by their lords, the bishops and abbots, any more than he did with the domestic or administrative appointments of great lay functionaries within their households or jurisdictions.
